"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 ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:Oven Bird, The Poetry by Robert Frost 1916 poems Works originally published in American magazines Works originally published in literary magazines American poems Modernist poems