Here is Oven Bird:
The Oven Bird
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.
Robert Frost
If you have never done so and if you imagine yourself a lover of literary art, pick a favorite poem by a highly renown poet. Google the poem for literary analysis. And dive in. If you have ever thought that language amounts to mutual agreement, that words have objective meaning, only an hour reading literary analysis of one poem will demonstrate that language has as much mutually agree-upon and/or objective meaning as Marc Rothko's paintings. Marc Rothko's work or any great abstract expressionist.
It is an illusion, perhaps a delusion, to think words are mutual agreements. Words are what we have to try to connect. One of the things we have to try to connect.
I set out, in this post, to answer Frost's question, 'what to make of a diminished thing'. Here is my answer, a poem by Emily Dickinson. Emily Dickinson spent virtually her entire life, with only two or three trips away, in Amherst, MA. And, as most people know, she stopped leaving her home almost entirely after she reached adulthood. (She did frequent the house next door where her brother, a beloved sister-in-law and a beloved nephew lived. The path is still there, between the houses. A visit to her home, open for tours, is worth it, especially to people who love her writing. I swear I felt her standing at the window of her second story bedroom, as she dropped a basket down to children playing on the lawn. Several times in the tour, I had a sense of someone ducking out of sight. I felt a rush of air, the sound of skirts moving. It was her. She used to stand at the top of the stairs so she could listen to the many visitors in the parlor. Sometimes she sent down word, requesting a particular song when someone was playing the piano. She was present in the parlor but upstairs. Her sister Lavinia sometimes joined her at the top of the stairs and sometimes mingled with the guests. As time passed, Emily stayed out of sight from all but Lavinia and her other family.
Robert Frost also spent many years in Amherst, also writing poems.
Here is my answer to the question, what becomes of a diminished thing.
The Black Berry—wears a Thorn in his side—
But no Man heard Him cry—
He offers His Berry, just the same
To Partridge—and to Boy—
He sometimes holds upon the Fence—
Or struggles to a Tree—
Or clasps a Rock, with both His Hands—
But not for Sympathy—
We—tell a Hurt—to cool it—
This Mourner—to the Sky
A little further reaches—instead—
Brave Black Berry—
Here is my analysis of the poem. I do not know, nor do I wish to, the language of poetry criticism. There are labels for various poetry patterns. A sonnet has fourteen lines, so many consider Oven Bird a sonnet. Iambic pentameter is about syllables but as soon as poets agreed upon what iambic pentameter meant, they seemed to have felt free to play around with it, as Frost does in Oven Bird. Shakespeare, I believe, wrote all his poetry in iambic pentameter. I remember being so amazed by that fact when I first learned about Shake's iambic pentameter in high school. It seemed impossible for someone to create so much rhyming, in rhythm, to discipline one's self to hard numbers of syllables per line.
Then I had a kid. I wanted to stretch her thinking as best I could so I played around with language a lot. Sometimes, I would try to speak in rhyme all day long, partly to have silly fun, partly to get her to pay closer attention to me, partly to sharpen her own thinking, sharpen her verbal skill. As a mother, I was not always on, but I was on a lot. I saw learning opportunities in everything we did and, as best as I could, I turned everything into learning games. If she wanted an apple at the store, I asked her to notice the different colors and choose one. When she knew her colors, I would buy as many apples as she could count, incentivizing her to learn how to count. I don't know if my homemade lessons added up to anything but she did get an academic scholarship to an Ivy. I digress, again and again, eh?!
Emily is not writing about blackberries in the above poem. She is offloading a bruise in her being, telling us she has a hurt that needs cooling. She hides this vulnerability as one might hide a bruise on one's forearm by putting on a long sleeved blouse. Being a gifted word artist, she hides her hurt inside a beautiful paean to the blackberry, using the blackberry's thorns to protect her hurt as she describes for her readers how the blackberry is protected from deer and other hungry animals by surrounding itself with thorns. Those thorns, protection, guardedness, both protect and allow the blackberry bramble itself to grow. Protecting one's self from the slings and arrows of life is necessary in order to thrive. Humans need guardedness, comparable to the blackberry's thorns. And then, since the thorns are already there, why not use them to allow us to grow.
Now, if you are interested in a language game, google Emily's poem for literary criticism and read the amazing array of what others see in the poem. I have never read any literary criticism of this poem. I am protecting my own analysis, my refusal to read others insights into the poem are my thorns, protecting my own tender self confidence. I am pretty sure Emily would have understood what I am getting at, even if no one else does.
I have told no one, speaking out loud, of the hurt I am feeling. I only write about it here on this blog that no one reads. No one I know. Occasionally, an internet traveler stops by. 47 people follow this blog. I wonder if any of them are someone I actually know. I think not. I do not know.
I understand a person needs to be guarded, to be a little thorny so one can 'be', and being implies growing, yes? When does pure self responsibility become mutual interdependence? When is a relationship codependent and when is it mutual support, a positive interdependence?
Ouch.
It might matter, esp. to Frost fans, that many poetry experts think the Oven Bird in the poem represents Frost himself, and that his Oven Bird poem is about poetry. People read all kinds of stuff into it.
I am still holding onto damage from my undergraduate experience. I would have been an English major but the head of the department, at my small liberal arts school, was a bully. He seemed to believe that all literary work had just one meaning. He blasted my papers for him because he said I always interpreted whatever literary work I was writing about wrongly. What the fuck? There is no such thing as a wrong interpretation of art. He seemed to think there was one right one. But, come to think of it, I wonder if I projected this onto him? Maybe I thought he thought everything I wrote was wrong because I thought everything I wrote was wrong.
Sometimes, life feels like what Lewis Carroll was trying to convey, at least I think he was, when he wrote the Mad Hatter scene. Gobbledegook and nonsense passing for people talking.
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