The Oven Bird by Robert Frost

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 the 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.

In this homage to a woodpecker, Frost takes the traditional sonnet format and follows it correctly except he places a couplet at the beginning of the poem instead of at the end (a fact which took an embarrassingly long time to figure out), as well as an interjecting couplet in the middle. The first couplet could have been done to grab the reader's attention with immediate rhyme. It certainly got me reading the poem with more intention and a with a slightly faster pace. The second couplet is a nice prerequisite to the volta which comes in line 8. Here Frost reflects less on what the bird is "saying" and focuses on the inner nature of the bird. He then poses his theme in the last line of the poem: "what to make of a diminished thing?" This makes me think that Frost is alluding the woodpecker is a master of turning something broken into gain, "making lemons out of lemonade" to be cliche. In this case, he can't sing, but his skill creates a rhythm of its own. So forage your own path you maverick woodpecker, and in the summer when I'm sleeping in, be sure to be by the tree outside my bedroom 5 o'clock sharp. God forbid I disturb your individuality.