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Tuesday
August is not a glamor month, what with the heat and the dust and summer coming to an end and school beginning. Perhaps that’s why Robert Frost shines a light on it in “The Oven Bird.” Although August flowers are to spring flowers as one is to ten, he says, the month confronts us with essential life questions. Someone has to address our diminishment, which is where the oven bird comes in.
Feeling somewhat diminished myself (possible heart arrhythmia, a prostate cancer diagnosis), I am heartened that there’s a poet that sings, like the oven bird, to my condition. What am I to make of it all? I’ll let you know when I’ve figured it out.
In the meantime, however, I’m struck once again about how there’s a poem for every occasion.
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.
