The Wisdom of Frost Exposed in The Oven Bird Essay

Nevertheless, in the poem ‘Nesting time’, Stewart interprets a personal experience in first person of the appearance of a bird that lands upon his daughter and forgets the thought of the harsh world. Stewart’s descriptive language repeatedly explains the poem as if seen in his viewpoint, beginning with an interjection, ‘oh’ communicating of his incredulity of an ‘absurd’ bird. Symbolizing the bird with strong coloured imagery its ‘mossy green, sunlit’, described to be bright and joyful, with sweetness shown with the type of bird, ‘honey-eater’, Douglas Stewart takes the time to describe its admiration juxtaposed to the dangerous world surrounding it. While visualizing the birds actions, ‘pick-pick-pick’ of alliteration and repetition of its

Frost’s various speaking tones can be shown in his well-known poem “Mending Wall.” Throughout the poem the speaker’s voice is open and relaxed, yet, inward and musing. It helps welcome the reader and at the time entices the reader into a riddle which becomes essential to the poem’s meaning. The speaker’s eventual speculation about what might not “love a wall” becomes a description of the struggle of wall-mending and begins to wonder why he and his neighbor have met to carry out the task in the first place. The speaker’s range of tone throughout the poem varies from seriousness to fantasy to glee.

Frost’s poem has a great sense of irony towards the end, “I shall be telling this with a sigh / somewhere ages and ages hence” (16-17). The irony is that while he’s making his choice he is already anticipating how he will tell the story in the future, almost adding a sense of drama

In “A Barred Owl,” Wilbur constructs a singsong narrative of two stanzas with three couplets each. This arrangement provides a simple and steady rhythm that echoes the parents’ crooning to their child when she is frightened by “the boom / [o]f an owl’s voice” (1-2). A light-hearted tone is established when they “tell the wakened child that all she heard / [w]as an odd question from a forest bird” (3-4). The parents’ personification of the owl makes it less foreign and intimidating, and therefore alleviates the child’s worry. The interpretation of the hooting as a repetitive and absurd question — “Who cooks for you?” — further makes light of the situation (6). The second stanza introduces a more ominous tone by directly addressing the contrasting purposes words may serve given a speaker’s intention. While they “can make our terror bravely clear,” they “[c]an also thus domesticate a fear” (7-8). This juxtaposition is

The writer makes use of diction to express his feelings towards the literary work and to set the dramatic tone of the poem. Throughout the poem, there is repetition of the word “I”, which shows the narrator’s individual feeling of change in the heart, as he experiences the sight of hundreds of birds fly across the October sky. As the speaker effortlessly recounts the story, it is revealed how deeply personal it is to him. Updike applies the words “flock” and “bird” repetitively to the poem, considering the whole poem is about the sight of seeing so many birds and the effect this has on a person. When the speaker first sees the flock of birds in lines 8-10, alliteration is applied to draw attention to what the narrator is witnessing. In line 29, Updike

Thus, through the initial impression of the man of the bird’s brave and challenging movements by the utilisation of poetic techniques, the reader is able to visualise the bird’s characteristic it inherits and gain a deeper understanding of nature and the impression of humanity distinctively.

Can a cow be anything more than a cow, or a wall actually be something other than a wall? Robert Frost, who lived from 1874 to 1963 and was considered one of America’s most eminent poets, demonstrated metaphors frequently within his poems. Readers of Frost’s poetry are often faced with the question, “What is Robert Frost really trying to say?” It is without a shadow of doubt that the American poet had the capability of taking his poetry and turning it into something preternatural, but not without the help of metaphors. Frost elaborated the meaning of metaphor as, “Saying one thing and meaning another, saying one thing in terms of another….” Several pieces of his work provides images such as a cow, a flower, country roads, and a wall that serve as metaphors for larger ideas.

Diction affects the tone of the passage. Starting from line 14, the diction evolves into a more negative view. He uses biblical reference towards the beginning of the stanza. He begins to analyze his surroundings more rigorously, and sees the differences in how they look from a distance, to how they appear close by. Once this negative connotation has begun, the flock is said to be “paled, pulsed, compressed, distended, yet held an identity firm” (Lines 20-21). The author’s choice of words as in “less marvelous” (line 25) indicates his intention for making his lines definite, giving it a solid state of meaning. It symbolizes that the feeling of someone longing for something, and once they receive it are not as impressed by it. The diction plays a critical role when the tone of the qualities of nature are exposed. The author conveys the “trumpeting” of the geese as an exaltation to the beauty and simplicity of nature. “A cloud appeared, a cloud of dots like iron filings which a magnet underneath the paper undulates” (Lines 16-18). The iron filings in this phrase symbolize the issues the man faces. Once he looks closely at the flock, he realizes that these issues are only miniscule and do not add up to life in general. This elates him, thus concluding him to lift his heart.

Kenneth Koch does not hold back in relating his parody to the original poem, mostly evidently through the similarity in the name of the parody. He also provides his own version of the ambiguous statement one comes across at the beginning of the Frost’s poem. Instead of deep and philosophical “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” (1) becomes a hilarious (marginally rude and lightly sexual) “Something there is that doesn’t hump a sump” (5). The meaning of the line is entirely irrelevant to the purpose of the parody itself, which not only pokes fun at the dubious sentiment of the original speaker, but also goes as far as to mimic the “iambic-like” free verse structure of Mending Wall, not to mention all the littered assonance of “hump” and “sump”. Koch satirizes the style and situation of Frost’s poem most likely to critique its attempt to allude a simple act of repair with something more critical, more

“Ink smeared like bird prints in snow” is the first simile that appears in the poem and serves multiple purposes. The most obvious one is the creation of imagery, where it compares the black words the persona writes on paper to the bird’s foot prints that are left behind when a bird walks on snow. The imagery alludes that the persona will leave a “footprint” in the form of a note that people can use to trace her path but she will never be there anymore. From line thirty-six to forty, the poet creates another imagery of a sparrow (a tiny and a delicate bird) flying in windy snowing weather. The sparrow is dizzied and sullied by the violent wind; it encounters a lot of difficulties and fear. In this imagery, the persona compares herself with the delicate bird. She compares the challenges that the sparrow goes through to the suffering she encounters relating to her parents.

At the bird’s appearance and apparent vocal articulation, he is at first impressed, then saddened. He compares this evening visitor as only another friend which will soon depart, just as “other friends have flown before” (58). But the raven again echoes quite aptly his one-word vocabulary, thus leading the man on to think more deeply about the possibilities that exist at this juncture. Somewhere deep inside him, he has realized that it doesn’t matter what question he poses, the bird will respond the same.

Overall, Frost’s poem “Out, Out-” uses a variety of literary devices to distinguish the setting and the most thorough meaning of the poem such as imagery, diction, and several figurative language

is saying, and Frosts personal pain that he is suffering from that he ingrains into this poem. The

Frost also discusses the use of symbolism in his talks at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference at Middlebury College in Connecticut. In “Being Let in on symbols” Frost discusses the value of metaphor and also that poetry should be understandable by the normal literate person who has grown up with figurative language and not just by scholars.

A. Birds don’t sing because the green energy of the lake has lost its charm. The winter has set in. Birds have gone to take shelter in their nests. It signifies that the knight has lost the melody of life and the rhythm has broken.