"The Oven Bird" by Robert Frost

THE OVEN BIRD

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 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.

Source of the text - Robert Frost, Mountain Interval.  New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1916, page 35.

TJB: Tea-cher, tea-cher. This sonnet, strongly misreading the birdsong as ode & elegy, has an offbeat rhyme scheme with couplets and tercets, & a lovely volta.