WHAT TO MAKE OF A DIMINISHED THING? →

Not long ago, I nominated Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” as a choice for the winner of my non-existant Major Poem of the Pandemic Award. On second thought, I’d like to broaden the field to include Robert Frost’s “The Oven Bird,” especially for the ultimate “question” the eponymous bird “frames in all but words”: What to make of a diminished thing?

Now, of course, all of us—at least those of us maintaining social distancing—are trying to figure out how to live lives lessened by the plague. Like those of us necessarily separated from our families and friends, Frost’s dour bird sings apart from others in its species. The bird also vocalizes in an in-between time and space, “mid-summer” and “mid-wood”; in a similar way, we wait in medias res, in the midst of great uncertainty about if and when the epidemic will end and how our lives will change.

In the interim, we’re faced with the challenge of making the best of our current reality. True, there’s an unavoidably somber tone to the word “diminished.” But there are benefits to be gained by walking in a wood in mid-summer, the forest’s silence broken only by an oven bird’ loud sound bouncing off the trees. The bird “knows in singing not to sing,” knows that it makes more sense to match its actions to its true environs rather than to make more of them than they are. A pragmatic, common-sense bird.

Of course, there are other ways to read the poem than as a simplistic parable for our present day. I also like how the sonnet reads when you substitute Frost the poet for the bird. Then the poem becomes an ars poetica, an apologia for a poet who’s always ironically lamenting, rather than celebrating or tragically mourning, the diminished state of human beings in an often malevolent void. Unlike Keats, for example, he’s a poet who “knows in singing not to sing.” That may be the song that best suits us now.