Learning to Hover: Robert Frost, Robert Francis, and the Poetry of Detached Engagement

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1999 by Andrew Stambuk

If the transcendentalists' essential influence on Frost and Francis was to encourage them to read meaning in natural objects, both poets part company with them in their focus on nature's dark truths. Two such poems whose similar subject matter reflects this focus are Frost's sonnet "The Oven Bird," published in 1916, and Francis's "The Wood Pewee," published in Valhalla and Other Poems. However, this similarity is less significant than the differences that divide Frost from Francis and here concern their tone and imagery. As in Frost's sonnet, Francis translates the song of a New England wood bird into words, hearing in its midsummer tune a portent of autumn's advent. Just as the ovenbird intones "that leaves are old" and "the highway dust is over all" (119-20), so the wood pewee sings of "the end of summer," the encroachment of fall, and the waning of the year:

In the shade of a tree in the heat of an afternoon

The wood pewee sings its portamento tune

That summer is over-ripe and autumn is soon.

He sings from a twig after flitting to catch a fly.

And whether he sings September or July

He sings of the end of summer and sings goodby. (41)

A harsher quality characterizes Frost's poem, one that is born from scattered images of dryness and diminishment that appear in it. [6] The ovenbird's reminder of the dwindling of flowers from spring to midsummer links nature's diminution to the cycles of birth and death. He says the petals of "pear and cherry bloom" that once fell during brief vernal showers are now overlaid by the "highway dust" that covers "all" ("dust" is itself an intimation of mortality). In the face of seasonal desiccation and the inexorable coming on of autumn, with its withering leaves, the ovenbird knows, unlike "other birds," not to sing a melodious and winsome tune. Or, as Frost puts it, "he knows in singing not to sing" (my italics).

By contrast, Francis stresses the lyrical beauty of the wood pewee's song, most notably in the shading of vowel sounds in "tree," "heat," and "pewee," and in the choice of the Italian "portamento," which emphasizes the shifting pitch of the bird's lilting tune. Then, Francis plays on short i sounds to accentuate not only the music of the pewee's tune but also the nimbleness of his movement, as the bird "sings from a twig after flitting to catch a fly." Of course, Frost too strings sounds together for a lyrical effect (as in the chiming e sounds of "petal," "pear," and "cherry" in lines 6-7). It's simply the case that Francis indulges here in a kind of preciousness that tempers the terse and pedagogical conclusion of his poem. Unlike Francis, Frost "knows in singing not to sing." [7] As a result, Francis's poems, generally speaking, do not achieve the bleak axiomatic eloquence that is characteristic of Frost's best lyrics. They rarely rise to the bitter pitch of "The Oven Bird," whose song Frost ultimately "f rames in a "question" ("what to make of a diminished thing"), which is answered by the poem itself (the poem is what he "makes" in the face of diminishment). [8]