Oven Bird Photo by Jim Philips

When it’s cold and dark, we can enjoy birds in books, including this lovely poem by Robert Frost, with commentary by CAS board member, John Elliot.

THE OVEN BIRD

by Robert Frost

There 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.

This is classic Frost: a non-traditional sonnet in simple conversational language, with depths of nuance.

From 1916, it seems quite relevant today. The intriguing question: what is the “diminished thing”? I’ve read it as the highway dust over all, diminishing the ovenbird’s forest home.

What do you think? I’ll be happy to hear from anyone Johnelliott4@gmail.com

Stop reading now if you want to keep the poem to yourself, or follow along for a few notes from others.

Andrew Spacey , along with other critics, says that the ovenbird is a metaphor for the poet himself. Frost said, “I am not a nature poet. There is almost always a person in my poems” And it should be noted that Frost had read and admired H. D. Thoreau’s groundbreaking book Walden, which mentions the song of the oven bird: “the oven-bird’s note is loud and unmistakable, making the hollow woods ring.”

If you’d like to see what some others think of the poem, here’s a start.