Explication/Interpretation/Illumination of “The Oven Bird” by Robert Frost

Discussion

Frost's contributions to literature were recognized in official ways. He was awarded 44 honorary degrees and four Pulitzer Prizes; he was the U.S. poet laureate and, at 86 years old, he became the first poet asked to read at a president's inauguration—and for no less an iconic figure in his own right, John F. Kennedy. But Frost's place in the hearts of many Americans is what separates him from all other American writers. Robert Frost is the only eminent American poet of the twentieth century who won a large general public, as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow did in the nineteenth century. One aspect of Frost's work is open and straightforward, but he also composed with a smaller, elite readership in mind. Reading, teaching, and writing about Frost necessarily must manifest awareness of this poet's double nature. "The Oven Bird" can be seen as a quintessential Frost poem, in which the central ideas are solidly defined, but the ways to interpret those ideas are varied. We might begin with the final lines, which provide a key to interpreting the rest of the poem's images and abstractions: "The question that he frames in all but words / Is what to make of a diminished thing." To frame a question is to set the parameters of a topic we want to investigate, and the speaker of the poem tells us that the oven bird investigates and sings about a diminished thing (Jahan, pp. 211).

Frost's attention to natural language made his incredible popularity possible, if indirectly. Among the effects of his use of day-to-day speech are uncomplicated syntax, simple vocabulary, and readily accessible content. Frost's poetry is readily understood after a single reading, and while there are nuances and difficulties to return to, it is possible to read any of Frost's poems once and come away with some grasp of its point or mood. Frost also depicts people in need of solitude, in need of companionship, as well as those who work well together or work at cross-purposes. The complex interrelations between the individual and society inform much of Frost's poetry. In a similar vein, you might consider the role of home in Frost's poetry.

The way in which the oven bird—"as other birds," too—got to speak, learned what we might call not his sing-song but his say-song—and his way of framing questions "in all but words"—are also part of Frost's concern. The oven bird's song is characterized as "a loud and clear teacher repeated about 10 times, louder and louder." (It has been argued that, since the oven bird, like many others, also produces a different, high-flying song for a time in spring, the poem is either suppressing discussion of this with a rhetorical strategy of its own, or repressing it. I believe that neither of these is the case and that the lesser-known fact is not, in this instance, to be considered as being deployed in the poem—either for the fact of early, youthful spring-song versus sober, didactic ...