Much as I like this poem by Robert Frost with its easy rhythms and neat descriptive touches, I regretfully have to point out that saying a thing well doesn’t make it true and that the last two lines sound like a piece of proverbial wisdom that like many pieces of proverbial wisdom doesn’t bear too much scrutiny. ‘One had to be versed in country things/Not to believe the phoebes wept’. On the contrary there must be innumerable town-dwelling folk who may not know much about the countryside and wouldn’t recognise a phoebe (a kind of American flycatcher) if one came and sat on their head but who would nonetheless be highly sceptical of the idea that birds could be in any way empathetic towards human loss, let alone weep for it.
The Need of Being Versed in Country Things
The house had gone to bring again
To the midnight sky a sunset glow.
Now the chimney was all of the house that stood,
Like a pistil after the petals go.
The barn opposed across the way,
That would have joined the house in flame
Had it been the will of the wind, was left
To bear forsaken the place’s name.
No more it opened with all one end
For teams that came by the stony road
To drum on the floor with scurrying hoofs
And brush the mow with the summer load.
The birds that came to it through the air
At broken windows flew out and in,
Their murmur more like the sigh we sigh
From too much dwelling on what has been.
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.
For them there was really nothing sad.
But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept,
One had to be versed in country things
Not to believe the phoebes wept.
Robert Frost
David Sutton 
What you say about city dwellers is probably true. Yet I take Frost’s point (or what I presume is his point): People often sentimentalize nature. They think of it as Mother, or as having some purpose that intersects with human interests (sometimes expressed as the “sympathetic chain of being “). Those who see nature up close are perhaps more likely to recognize its heartless tendencies.
I take your point, but it could also be argued that the extensive folklore surrounding birds suggests that country people are no less likely than town-dwellers to hold entertaining but irrational beliefs about them, indeed are perhaps more likely to do so from being in more intimate contact with them. A woodpecker knocking on your roof is more likely to be looking for insects than announcing a forthcoming death in the house; doves are no more peaceable than other birds; magpies do not congregate in specific numbers to convey a range of messages to us; the mournful cry of lapwings does not necessarily presage a disaster; swans are not capable of shapeshifting into human beings and back, and so on.
You’re right, of course. Farm lore includes, or used to, a belief in fairies as well. It seems Frost, in trying to differentiate between those who believe nature cares about humans and those with a more clinical view, put the dividing line in the wrong place; country folk may be as likely to romanticize nature as city folk. But I do wonder if he was actually being careless. Could he have intended to mock the idea that country folk know best? He knew both country and city life intimately, after all, and sometimes misled readers to make a point. (“I took the [road] less traveled by, / and that has made all the difference.”)
Good point. It just hadn’t struck me that on this occasion he might be teasing us. As you say, he was certainly well capable of it.