Frost’s poetry does reflect an interest in other creatures and in their primordial sounds as a source of meaning. The sonnet “The Oven Bird” represents the voice of a stoic creature, surviving and creating meaningful sound in a difficult environment. Frost insisted on creating fresh meaning while working within such traditional and demanding forms as the sonnet or the iambic pentameter line; it reinforced the sense of both tension and limitation that he found challenging and exciting in life. Both indoor and outdoor schooling help in understanding the poem. The song of oven birds rises suddenly and sharply before falling, ending in a repetitive utterance that sounds, suggestively, like “preacher, preacher, preacher.” Darwin describes how oven birds build their nests, which look like human homes, on the ground with both inner and outer chambers. In addition to the North American warbler, Frost also wryly alludes to Darwin’s discussion of the oven bird, from the genus Furnarius, in The Voyage of the Beagle. Darwin considered it one of those creatures that might eventually reveal the way all species are related. In the same book Darwin discusses the songs of little Hyla frogs, the subject of the sonnet “Hyla Brook” that Frost paired with “The Oven Bird” in Mountain Interval. Frost loved The Voyage of the Beagle (he owned three copies), and the pairing of the two poems reveals the subtle way Frost draws complex material into his poetry without encumbering its aural effect. The sonnet’s octave suggests the rejuvenating power of the oven bird’s song:

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.

But as the bird’s song drops, the sonnet turns on the line that begins the concluding sestet: “And comes that other fall we name the fall,” and we learn of the oven bird’s ability to sing when other birds have gone silent by not quite singing:

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.