Yet for them the lilac renewed its leaf, And the aged elm, though touched with fire; And the dry pump flung up an awkward arm; And the fence post carried a strand of wire.
Lentricchia, F., Robert Frost: Modern Poetics and the Landscapes of Self, 1975, Duke University Press The narrator also imagines the chimney (a human artifice) as a flower that has dropped its petals (a natural phenomenon).
The narrator evokes a fictionalized memory of the clatter of sweaty horse teams entering a flung-open barn door under the hands of the defunct house’s human inhabitants.
For a moment, the narrator is overcome by nostalgia for the time before the farm had been “emptied of human activity.” Bagby, G.F., Frost and the Book of Nature, 1993, The University of Tennessee Press The fourth quatrain tells of the birds now flying in and out of the barn through its broken windows, using it as shelter.
Lentricchia, F., Robert Frost: Modern Poetics and the Landscapes of Self, 1975, Duke University Press The phoebes’ soft comings and goings contrast starkly with the ruckus evoked in the third stanza.
This stanza reveals to the reader that the fire was something that happened long ago, and this sense of time passing is Frost’s crucial point.
The phoebes belong to a separate order of reality.” Lentricchia, F., Robert Frost: Modern Poetics and the Landscapes of Self, 1975, Duke University Press All they grasp is that it is once again spring, time to nest and mate, on schedule with the lilacs blooming.