Chapter 5, The Runaway and Other Animals Summary

Untermeyer opens the fifth chapter by explaining that Frost has an affection for animals that is universal across the animal, bird and insect kingdoms. He understands nature as well as the greatest of nature poets, better than his contemporaries, and is still transcendent of that category.

The first poem of the chapter is "The Oven Bird" and is about a bird who sings in the mid-summer the way some birds sing in spring when the flowers and trees are at their most fresh, blooming and fragrant. His song is reserved for the mid-summer when he makes the trees sing that have gone barren of flowers and dust has covered the roads. The wisdom Frost sees in the fact that the hot, tired green of summer past its bloom is the time the bird...