The repetition of “the fall” evokes not only the oncoming season but, wryly, the biblical Fall. But “the fall” is part of the mythology created by our names. The oven bird’s question in “all but words” indicates the superfluousness of words before the power of primordial, creaturely sound. One of the issues raised by the poem is whether our Judeo-Christian stories of loss and redemption can continue to have meaning in a world of common creaturely descent and constant struggle, the world of Darwin. The poem also describes the tension between linear time and cyclical time. And the question so framed is how to interpret such a world, this “diminished thing.” Frost uses the word “thing” and its variant “something” throughout his poetry in a brilliant way that reflects the elusiveness of reality and the inadequacy of our names. Little things in Frost stand as parts or samples reflecting a larger whole: “I believe in what the Greeks called synecdoche: the philosophy of the part for the whole; skirting the hem of the goddess. All that an artist needs is samples.” Later, he wrote setting him apart from his modernist contemporaries, “I started calling myself a synecdochist when others called themselves Imagists or Vorticists. . . . Always a larger significance. A little thing touches a larger thing.” Frost no doubt worked in a rhetorical tradition of romantic thought that William Blake announced in the first aphorism of “Auguries of Innocence”: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand/And a Heaven in a Wild Flower/Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand/ And Eternity in an Hour.” But Frost also doubted that a “World,” “Infinity,” or “Eternity” could be found in the facts of the world. Nature’s flux may not reveal “Truth,” but at least, as he wrote, “For once, then, something.”

The importance of sound in Frost extends deep into the realm of human relations. During his years in England, he revealed in letters the emphasis he had begun to place on the dramatic tones of talk and the posturing of the human voice in the creation of meaning. In 1914, he wrote to his former student John Bartlett; “I give you a new definition of a sentence: A sentence is a sound on which other sounds called words may be strung.” He wanted to capture “the sounds of sense with all their irregularity of accent across the regular beat of the meter.” Frost’s insights coincided with an emphasis on drama and speech, recognizing that meaning is created through dialogue and conversation. Meaning is dramatic, and words and sentences are ultimately deeds. Frost liked to “say” poems, not “read” them, because of his emphasis on the dramatic life and flexibility of meaning through sentence sounds and voice posturing. Meaning was not inherent in words alone or beyond them but in the tension between words and the undercurrent of dramatic tones on which the words flowed. Frost saw colloquy and dialogue as a metaphor for the struggle and agon of creation, the creation and destruction of masks and postures in the play of existence. Poems in which characters appear have obscure and different ways of looking at the world—“Mending Wall,” “The Code,” “The Mountain,” “Home Burial”—reveal much more about themselves and their motives through their tone. In the early poem “Revelation,” Frost asserts the limits of masquerade and mystery “Behind light words that tease and flout,” recognizing in the end that “. . . all, from babes that play/At hide-and-seek to God afar,/So all who hide too well away/Must speak and tell us where they are.” And when they speak, it is the tone that speaks and not only the rhetorical postures of words.