The Aim Was Song - Analysis

Wild Wind, Not Yet Music

The poem’s central claim is that art is not a separate substance from nature, but a disciplined version of what nature is already trying to do. Frost begins with a world where the wind is powerful but purposeless: it blew itself untaught, doing its loudest day and night in any rough place. The tone here is blunt and physical, full of force and accident. The wind has volume and endurance, but no “right” direction; it catches on rough places rather than choosing a fitting path.

Man as Corrector: The Risky Confidence of Taste

The poem turns when Man came to tell the wind what was wrong. That phrase carries a faintly comic arrogance: who is man to diagnose the wind? Yet the complaint is oddly aesthetic rather than moral. The wind hadn’t found the place to blow, it blew too hard, and crucially, the aim was song. Frost frames music as a kind of destiny the wind “means,” but cannot reach alone. The tension is sharp: the wind’s natural freedom is also its failure; the very force that makes it impressive prevents it from becoming intelligible.

The Mouth as Instrument: Where Nature Meets Form

What changes the wind is not a machine but a body. The man took a little in his mouth and held it long, controlling breath the way an instrument-maker controls air. The almost magical line about north being converted into south suggests that art reverses, redirects, even contradicts raw impulse. The wind is not destroyed; it is portioned. “A little” matters: the poem insists that beauty begins with limitation, with the choice to let less through.

By measure: Making a World You Can Hear

The repeated insistence—By measure—is the poem’s clearest statement of method and its main emotional shift. The earlier wind was unpatterned loudness; now it becomes word and note. Frost doesn’t linger on technique, but he makes “measure” feel like a moral category: a way of making power responsible. The phrase blew it forth suggests release, not repression; restraint is what allows a true utterance to happen, like speech finally forming from mere breath.

What the Wind Had Meant to be

The ending lands on a paradox: the measured wind becomes the wind the wind had meant to be. In other words, nature’s “real” self is revealed through human shaping. That’s a bold, slightly unsettling idea—nature needing instruction to become itself—and Frost intensifies it by bringing the wind into the realm of consciousness: the wind could see. The tone becomes quietly triumphant, almost tender: the wind passes through the lips and throat, a passage that makes it sound like song is a kind of shared breathing between world and person.

A Hard Question the Poem Leaves Behind

If the aim was song, was the wind truly aiming before man arrived, or is man simply projecting an aim onto it and calling that projection destiny? Frost keeps both possibilities alive: the wind is personified enough to “mean” and “see,” yet the poem also shows how easily a powerful force can be renamed “wrong” until it matches human taste.