"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
The ovenbird (''Seiurus aurocapilla'') is a small songbird of the New World warbler family (Parulidae). This migratory bird breeds in eastern North America and winters in Central America, many Caribbean islands, Florida and northern Venezuela.
...
singing.
Background
It has been described as a quintessential Frost poem.
[Little, Michael R. (ed.) ''Bloom's How to Write about Robert Frost.'' Infobase Publishing, ] Several Frost biographers and critics have interpreted the poem as autobiographical.
[Maxson, H. A. (2005). ''On the Sonnets of Robert Frost: A Critical Examination of the 37 Poems.'' McFarland, ] Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom (July 11, 1930 – October 14, 2019) was an American literary critic and the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. In 2017, Bloom was described as "probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking worl ...
argues that the bird in Frost is "at best a compromised figure" who learns in singing not to sing.
[Bloom, Harold (2003). ''Robert Frost.'' Infobase Publishing, ]
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
External links
On "The Oven Bird"(collection of commentary) via
University of Illinois
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Univer ...
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Poetry by Robert Frost
1916 poems
Works originally published in American magazines
Works originally published in literary magazines
American poems
Modernist poems