The Oven Bird
"The Oven Bird" is a 1916 poem by Robert Frost, first published in Mountain Interval. The poem is written in sonnet form and describes an ovenbird singing.
Background
It has been described as a quintessential Frost poem.[1] Several Frost biographers and critics have interpreted the poem as autobiographical.[2] Harold Bloom argues that the bird in Frost is "at best a compromised figure" who learns in singing not to sing.[3]
Text
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.
References
- ^ Little, Michael R. (ed.) Bloom's How to Write about Robert Frost. Infobase Publishing, ISBN 978-1-60413-347-9
- ^ Maxson, H. A. (2005). On the Sonnets of Robert Frost: A Critical Examination of the 37 Poems. McFarland, ISBN 978-0-7864-2420-7
- ^ Bloom, Harold (2003). Robert Frost. Infobase Publishing, ISBN 978-0-7910-7443-5
External links
- On "The Oven Bird" (collection of commentary) via University of Illinois
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4c/Wikisource-logo.svg/38px-Wikisource-logo.svg.png)
- v
- t
- e
- "Acquainted with the Night"
- "After Apple-Picking"
- "Birches"
- "The Death of the Hired Man"
- "Desert Places"
- "Fire and Ice"
- "For John F. Kennedy His Inauguration"
- "The Gift Outright"
- "Mending Wall"
- "The Need of Being Versed in Country Things"
- "Nothing Gold Can Stay"
- "Out, Out—"
- "The Oven Bird"
- "A Question"
- "The Road Not Taken"
- "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"
collections
- Robert Frost Farm, New Hampshire
- The Frost Place, Home and Museum
- Robert Frost Farm (Ripton, Vermont)
- Robert Frost Farm (South Shaftsbury, Vermont)
- Robert Frost House, Massachusetts
- Robert Frost Medal
- Frostiana (1959 choral art)
- Robert Frost: A Lover's Quarrel with the World (1963 documentary)
- Robert Frost: A Life (2000 biography)
- John F. Kennedy, Remarks at Amherst College on the Arts