"The woods" are "too dark" for a bird because a bird is too far gone at being a bird. No motion of its soul, alias "sleight of wing," can improve its eventual fate in these "woods." Whose woods these are I think we know: one of their branches is where a bird is to end up anyway, and a "perch" gives a sense of these woods' being well structured: it is an enclosure—a sort of chicken coop, if you will. Thus, our bird is doomed; no last-minute conversion ("sleight" is a conjuring term) is feasible, if only because a bard is too old for any quick motion of the hand. Yet, old though he is, he still can sing.
And in the third stanza you have that bird singing: you have the song itself, the last one. It is a tremendously expansive gesture. Look at how every word here postpones the next one. "The last"—caesura—"of the light"— caesura—"of the sun"—line break, which is a big caesura —"That had died"—caesura—"in the west." Our bird/bard traces the last of the light to its vanished source. You almost hear in this line the good old "Shenandoah," the song of going West. Delay and postponement are palpable here.
''The last" is not finite, and "of the light" is not finite, and "of the sun" is not. What's more, "that had died" itself is not finite, though it should have been. Even "in the west" isn't. What we've got here is the song of lingering: of light, oflife. You almost see the finger pointing out the source and then, in the broad circular motion of the last two lines, returning to the speaker in "Still lived"—caesura—"for one song more"—line break—"In a thrush's breast." Between "The last" and "breast" our poet covers an extraordinary distance: the width of the continent, if you will. Mter all, he describes the light, which is still upon him, the opposite of the darkness of the woods. The breast is, after all, the source of any song, and you almost see here not so much a thrush as a robin; anyhow, a bird singing at sunset: it lingers on the bird's breast.
And here, in the opening lines of the fourth stanza, is where the bird and the bard part ways. "Far in the pillared dark I Thrush music went." The key word here is "pillared," of course: it suggests a cathedral interior—a church, in any case. In other words, our thrush flies into the woods, and you hear his music from within, "almost like a call to come in I To the dark and lament." If you want, you may replace "lament" with "repent": the effect will be practically the same. What's being described here is one of the choices before our old bard this evening: the choice he does not make. The thrush has chosen that "sleight of wing" after all. It is bettering its perch for the night; it accepts its fate, for lament is acceptance. You could plunge yourselfhere into a maze of ecclesiastical distinctions—Frost's essential Protestantism, etc. I'd advise against it, since a stoic posture befits believers and agnostics alike; in this line of work, it is practically inescapable. On the whole, references (religious ones especially) are not to be shrunk to inferences.
"But no, I was out for stars" is Frost's usual deceptive maneuver, projecting his positive sensibility: lines like that are what earned him his reputation. If he was indeed "out for stars," why didn't he mention that before? Why did he write the whole poem about something else? But this line is here not solely to deceive you. It is here to deceive—or, rather, to quell—himself. This whole stanza is. Unless we read this line as the poet's general statement about his presence in this world—in the romantic key, that is, as a line about his general metaphysical appetite, not to be quenched by this little one-night agony.
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked,
And I hadn't been.
There is too much jocular vehemence in these lines for us to take them at face value, although we should not omit this option, either. The man is shielding himself from his own insights, and he gets grammatically as well as syllabically assertive and less idiomatic—especially in the second line, "I would not come in," which could be easily truncated into "I won't come in." "I meant not even if asked" comes off with a menacing resoluteness, which could amount to a statement of his agnosticism were it not for the last line's all too clever qualifier: "And I hadn't been."This is indeed a sleight of hand.
Or else you can treat this stanza and, with it, the whole poem as Frost's humble footnote or postscript to Dante's Commedia, which ends with "stars"—as his acknowledgment of possessing either a lesser belief or a lesser gift. The poet here refuses an invitation into darkness; moreover, he questions the very calclass="underline" "Almost like a call to come in . . . " One shouldn't make heavy weather of Frost's affinity with Dante, but here and there it's palpable, especially in the poems dealing with dark nights of the soul—for instance, in "Acquainted with the Night." Unlike a number of his illustrious contemporaries, Frost never wears his learning on his sleeve—mainly because it is in his bloodstream. So "I meant not even if asked" could be read not only as his refusal to make a meal of his dreadful apprehension but also as a reference to his stylistic choice in ruling out a major form. Be that as it may, one thing is clear: without Dante's Commedia, this poem wouldn't have existed.
Still, should you choose to read "Come In" as a nature poem, you are perfectly welcome to it. I suggest, though, that you take a longer look at the title. The twenty lines of the poem constitute, as it were, the title's translation. And in this translation, I am afraid, the expression "come in" means "die."
III
While in "Come In" we have Frost at his lyrical best, in "Home Burial" we have him at his narrative best. Actually, "Home Burial" is not a narrative; it is an eclogue. Or, more exactly, it is a pastoral—except that it is a very dark one. Insofar as it tells a story, it is, of course, a narrative; the means of that story's transportation, though, is dialogue, and it is the means of transportation that defines a genre. Invented by Theocritus in his idylls, refined by Virgil in the poems he called eclogues or bucolics, the pastoral is essentially an exchange between two or more characters in a rural setting, returning often to that perennial subject, love. Since the English and French word "pastoral" is overburdened with happy connotations, and since Frost is closer to Virgil than to Theocritus, and not only chronologically, let's follow Virgil and call this poem an eclogue. The rural setting is here, and so are the two characters: a farmer and his wife, who may qualify as a shepherd and a shepherdess, except that it is two thousand years later. So is their subject: love, two thousand years later.
To make a long story short, Frost is a very Virgilian poet. By that, I mean the Virgil of the Bucolics and the Georgics, not the Virgil of the Aeneid. To begin with, the young Frost did a considerable amount of farming—as well as a lot of writing. The posture of gentleman farmer wasn't all posture. As a matter of fact, until the end of his days he kept buying farms. By the time he died, he had owned, if I am not mistaken, four farms in Vermont and New Hampshire. He knew something about living off the land—not less, in any case, than Virgil, who must have been a disastrous farmer, tojudge by the agricultural advice he dispenses in the Georgics.