I love this sonnet by Robert Frost, capturing something of an autumnal wistfulness. He begins with a straightforward, almost flat statement, “There is a singer everyone had heard,” but his description of the oven bird’s plain chirrup soon wafts into evocative paradox: “On sunny days, a moment overcast.” His lyricism builds as he develops a steady meter, only to leave the reader lingering in question with his final line.
Words fall short of expressing life’s mysteries—especially in a fallen world, especially about a fallen world—but Frost shows that the music of poetry, like birdsong, is composed of more than mere words.
The Oven Bird
by Robert FrostThere is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.
