New England (marked in RED)
Robert Frost - Natural SymbolismBirches Robert Frost is a modern poet whose poetry is written to be easily understood and read as though it were everyday speech. He uses free verse to tell of his love and respect for nature. He also utilizes natural symbolism in a lot of his writings. He has written about rural landscape and wildlife so much that people often refer to his as a nature poet. In the poem Birches, Frost utilizes natural symbolism to explain how heaven is the ideal realm of purity and light, a place in which we can aspire to. He also explains how the tension between earthly satisfactions and higher aspirations emerges from the recollection of a childhood game. The use of unrhymed iambic pentameter helps Frost illustrate his personal experiences of loneliness, love, and desire. Frost's description of loneliness is provided immediately after he first refers to himself with his specific description in Line 20. There he states, I should prefer to have some boy bend (the birches). He describes the loneliness of his youth, writing that he was a boy on a farm too far from town to learn baseball whose only play was found in him. As a young boy, Frost’s only amusement was to swing from the birches. His attempts to conquer loneliness were demonstrated through the vehicle of the birches. Frost goes on to describe perhaps the most valuable lesson he learned as a child trying to overcome loneliness, the lesson of practice makes perfect. Frost states He always kept his poise to the top of the branches climbing carefully with...pains...Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish kicking his way down through the air to the ground. He learned here that there are times in life when one will conquer a situation be done with it, and fly joyfully away knowing that one has conquered it. Frost also uses Birches to illustrate his experiences with love. He has apparently been hurt by love before, stating, I'd like to get away from earth and then come back to it and begin over. May no fate willfully misunderstand me And half grant what I wish and snatch me away not to return. Apparently his heart has been broken by a lost love. He may think this is because he submitted vulnerably to her, but if he had a chance to do it again, he might not submit himself so much to the next thief. However, he definitely has the desire to achieve love. His desire to achieve is described when he states how he would like to achieve love. Frost states, I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree, and climb...toward heaven (the top or ultimate of his desire, be it love or something else) till the tree (or the world) could bear not more, but dipped its tip and set me down again. He is possibly stating that no matter what life one pursues, one can use the world as a tree that one can climb to the top, but realize that at a certain point, the world will no longer be able to support one. Frost ends his poem stating his satisfaction with overcoming loneliness and love and benefiting from the desire to achieve by writing, One could do worse than be a swinger of birches. Birches is written beautifully in blank verse, even though each line is in iambic pentameter. The absence of rhyme scheme implies that a poet must compensate for this in other ways. Frost’s does this wonderfully with the use of enjambment and imagery in his poem. This can be seen in his explanation of the appearance of the birches. Frost explains the appearance of the birches scientifically implying that natural phenomenon makes the branches bend and sway. Frost also lends sound to his description of the branches as “they click upon themselves as the breeze rises.” Frost explains the branches are bent by the ice, but do not break. Frost again adds beautiful imagery comparing the bent branches “trailing their leaves on the ground” to “girls on hands and knees throwing their hair before them to dry in the sun.”
Source:
http://www.essays.cc/free_essays/e5/qmr300.shtmlGreat Poem!!!!!!2003-12-13
Added by: Mullet Master
First published in the Atlantic Monthly in August 1915, Birches was later included in the Mountain Interval volume. Birches was received well by critics and the general public. At this time, Frost’s dexterity as a poet was becoming evident to the critics and poets of the time. Birches is a perfect example of a Frost poem, it carries the essentials that were his trademark. As a pastoral poet, his trademark consisted of the rural country side in America and its personage as themes. Typical for Frost poems, the scenes of Birches are rural. Presumably, it is set in New England, which is riddled with the native tree and it being the longtime home for Frost. Frost was born in San Francisco on March 29 1963, but his family moved to Massachusetts in 1885 after his father’s death. It was in New England where he spent his childhood and his last days. The poem is a short narrative of his life as a youth in New England, frolicking with the Birches in the rural. At the time Birches was written, Frost had just arrived to America from a three year stay in England. His absence of his dear native home might have contributed to the reminiscent quality the poem has. Till this day many critics exalt Birches as one of Frost’s finest works; others protest, claiming that it is “lyrically second rate” to his other work. Frost structures Birches in six sections. In the beginning of the poem, the first six and a half lines consist of an introduction. Frost briefly writes of birches that have presumably been bent by a boy having fun. Then, in the next thirteen and a half lines, he describes birches that have been bent by ice storms in graphic detail. Frost then takes a quick break to rethink his thoughts for two lines before continuing. Following this, eighteen lines are then dedicated to describing the boy and his frolicking in swinging on the birches. After, for thirteen lines Frost writes of how he once was that joyous boy. Finally in the summary, he contemplates his thoughts in the last six lines. In the first six and a half lines of Birches, Frost writes about bent birches that he sees among straighter, darker birches. As he sees them, he begins to delightfully imagine that a boy has bent them in frolic. He imagines the boy swinging on them, his imagination turns into a fantasy then into daydream. However, he quickly comes to his senses and knows that it is not the boy, but the “ice-storms” that “bent them down to stay” in that manner and not a boy; only ice-storms could do that. He wakes himself out of the daydream with a shot of reason. It is his wishful thinking that draws him to delusion.Describing the birches in the next thirteen and a half lines, Frost gives a vivid description of the trees that incites the imagination. He describes how the birches become crusted with ice from rain. The ice causes the tree’s bark to buckle and crack. When the sun rises, the ice begins to melt and break, which causes a miniature shower of crystals to fall from the birch. Frost describes this phenomenon similar to the “…inner dome of heaven had fallen.” By this he means that the phenomenon is so beautiful it is as if gems from the out skirts of heaven were falling on earth. The buckling and cracking of their trunks causes the birches to bend downwards into the decayed brush. After this, they bend far down, they don’t break and “…never right themselves…” again. Frost continues the description with a great simile; he makes the comparison to the bent birches drying their leaves in the sun with a girl on her hands and knees drying her hair in the sun. The arched spine of the girl become the birches bent trunk while her wet hair becomes the wet leaves.Frost uses a metaphor for life; the rural man which is more oriented with nature versus the modern man, which is technologically oriented. The ice becomes a metaphor for modern man’s idealism while the birch becomes the natural person. Frost implies that modern mans ideology is artificial, saturated with technology and ideas contrary to that of nature. Frost is saying that when mankind adopts the modern man’s ideology, after a while that we become engulfed in unimportant, artificial meaningless beliefs; enclosing them in a delusional shell, shutting everything else off. This causes people to ignore, not value, and take nature for granted; but at one point they realize the way of the modern man is not the right way. When he speaks of the “…inner dome of heaven...” he speaks of people eventually coming to realize at the near end of their lives that it was not worth it, they didn’t enjoy the fruits of nature and life. They want to trade it all to have a new start, a reincarnation to set things right, but once they realize that it is too late they become depressed and fall apart, like the ice crystals on the birch. Everything comes tumbling down, but they keep on living, depresses and regretful, never again being themselves. This is represented by the birches never righting themselves. For two lines, frost takes a break from his daydream. In these two lines, he has somewhat of a rethought. Here again his fantasy world is abruptly cut off as he slips into logic. As he spoke of the natural process of how birches are bent with ice storms, he realizes the logical explanation for this occurrence. The shot of logic destroys his wishful thinking and grounds him to reality. He wants to believe that it was a boy, who bent them, but logic does not allow it and he realizes it.Then Frost gives a vivid description of the boy who he imagines as the one who induced the birches to become bent. Imagining that this boy is one who was in route to fetch his father’s cows but decided to engage in some frolicking with the birches, Frost describes him. This boy Frost imagines, lives so deep in the rural area, that he does not know any games but those of his own imagination. This boy has ridden all of his father’s birches so much that he bends them for good, taking the “…stiffness out of them…” Frost’s imaginary boy has been bending birches for so long that he has turned it into a science. By describing the boy’s bending of birches, he gives him the essence of a ballerina in movement, with grace and beauty. This boy that Frost speaks of is more than just a boy from a rural area, this boy represents Frost, stripped from all modern ideologies, his natural self. When Frost uses the word “prefer,” he means that this is what he imagines of himself. Frost writes “Some boy too far from town to learn baseball…”, by this he means distant enough to be influenced by meaningless activities that do not allow him to be himself. He continues to say that his imagination soars beyond the seasons, beyond nature, it is the only thing that can conquer nature; a baseball cannot do that. It’s the imagination and not knowledge that matters.Afterwards, Frost reveals that he once was a “swinger of birches”, and dreams of going back to being one. He creates a simile of the journey of life to a walk in the woods by saying that when he’s down, he escapes and becomes a swinger of birches. Frost goes on to say how he would like to go into his daydreams for “a while” and come back, but he realizes that he needs to be in reality because that is where his loved ones are now. A symbolism arises when he makes the simile between the journey of life and the “pathless woods.” The “pathless woods” become the unknown critical decisions and responsibilities of life that arrive as one enters into adulthood. While walking through the pathless woods, we are bound to walk into “cobwebs” that “burn and tickle” our faces. The cobwebs are the trials and tribulations that are feared because of their casting of unknown consequence, regardless of choice; they generate great anxiety or doubt in us. Frost continues, saying that “…one eye weeps…” because of a branch that “…lashed across it open.” The branch becomes a metaphor for past decisions or anxieties that at one time or another have made us cry or feel pain. Presumably, they are our disappointments of the missing of certain quotas.As he speaks of leaving “earth for a while”, Frost speaks deeply of life, death, and happiness rather that just fantasizing. Frost is saying that he would like to die and reincarnate himself as a birch swinging boy to begin all over again. This boy is one who is happy and carefree of responsibilities and opinions. Or he could mean that he wishes to reincarnate himself, to begin all over again and not make the same mistake. He continues by saying that if he does die, he does not want the Most High or the God thinking he did not value his life when he died. He does see the beauty and goodness of life. He just wants half of the wish; he wants his eternal rest and not come back because he’s too worn out in this world and wants to rest.In the final section, Frost states that when the time comes for his death, he would want to go in to his afterlife by climbing a birch tree with “black branches” and a “snow white trunk”. He would like to climb till the “the tree could bear no more.” As he climbs he says that the top of the birch would bend with its tip back down, setting him “down” again. He wishes to come and go in this way. It ends as he says “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.”In the last section of the poem, Frost speaks metaphorically of how he would like to depart in this world. When he speaks of climbing the birch with black branches and white trunk, he speaks of innocence. He is saying that he wants to leave the earth as a child, full of joy and innocence. The child’s innocence and joy is at its peak when he is at play, bending birches. The black branches and snow white trunk represent the black and white world of the child, it is simple and easy. As one enters adulthood the gray shaded areas enter. Frost then continues by saying that this state of being, as one leaves for the afterlife, is the purest way to leave the earth. In some slight way, Frost speaks of incarnation; a rebirth of the soul. Throughout the entire poem, Frost has a reminiscing and wishful tone. He speaks of his childhood as a swinger of birches which is a symbol of his innocence. Frost does not show any other emotions other than the hope of happiness or melancholy throughout the poem. The tone also shifts gears often, switching from a happy fantasy to a harsh reality. For example, in the second section of the poem, Frost describes the birches being covered in ice. As he describes them in ice, he uses pleasurable language. Using phrases such as “…the breeze rises…,” “…the sun rises…” and “…inner dome of heaven…” to describe the trees covered in ice. The word heaven radiates the idea of pure and untouched, virginity. As he describes the ice breaking and it’s touching of the earth, his words and tone change. Using words such as “…heaps of broken glass…” and “…dragged to the withered bracken…”. Toggling of tone occurs throughout the poem. The tone mimics not only the structure of the poem, but also Frost toggling between fantasy and reality. Frost uses simple language in Birches to ease the reader, relax and fade into his world. This allows the poem to become a bridge between Frost’s emotions and experiences with the reader’s, allowing a unification of mind, body, and soul. The rhythm of the poem has an iambic pentameter blended with irregularity of speech. In the first four lines, Frost starts out regular. The poems wording, rhythm and tone are all aligned to give a harmonious quality. This harmony gives the poem a celebration of life, that appreciates its ups and even its downs. It’s as if this poem is a meditation of Frost. The rhythm is similar to that of deep slow breaths that one gives in an altered state of mind. This incites the idea that this poem is the last words that Frost gives as he lies, slipping into his eternal sleep.Furthermore, Birches is a perfect example of a Robert Frost poem; it uses imagery from rural America to incite an allegory, full of emotions and sensations. The structure is well created; the sections fade in together like thoughts being pondered. The imagery gives the poem a natural essence. Birches is not only about old man Frost remembering his swinging of birches. It’s a return to earth, appreciation of nature. It’s about Frost being himself, lifting the veil of life and death, human’s greatest experiences. He talks of the childhood innocence and the burdens that are attached to adulthood. It’s an insight into Frost’s being. The poems tone, wording, and rhythm gives a vibe celebrating life, including its ups and downs. Birches is more than a poem, it is life. Tupac Shakur once said “Reality is wrong, dreams are for real”.
An essay analyzing Birches
2004-01-22
Added by: Jane Freedman
Childhood means many different things to different people. It could be symbolized by summer nights catching fireflies or times at the beach with grandma or selling lemonade at the street corner. For Robert Frost, it is symbolized by climbing birch trees. He immortalizes this memory in the poem Birches, along with some somber thoughts about aging and death. The beginning of the poem is about walking in the woods, seeing bent birch trees and thinking back to the days when he was young and climbed them. At first he is rational, and realizes that they could not possibly be bent by a young boy, but that the ice and snowfall must have bent them over. This symbolizes his old-age cynicism about life, and how he can’t even allow himself to think a happy thought- “I would like to think some boy’s been swinging on them/ but swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay/ As ice storms do [...]/ But I was going to say when Truth broke in/ With all her matter of fact about the ice storm/ I should prefer to have some boy bend them [...]”He then dwells into the memory of climbing birch trees. Parts of this memory also symbolize the actual obstacles and experiences children encounter throughout their short lives. “One by one he subdued his father’s trees/ By riding them down over and over again/ Until he took the stiffness out of them,/ And not one but hung limp, not one was left/ For him to conquer [...].” This refers to the hurdles that people encounter throughout life, particularly childhood, and how they eventually jump those hurdles and just end up encountering more, and jumping those, until their lives end. When all the trees are limp, there is nothing left for the boy to do, and in this sense, his life is over... he has died. Another phrase in the poem, “He learned all there was/ To learn about not launching out too soon [...]” symbolizes children’s rush to do everything independently. It is another phrasing of the common saying “look before you leap”. Children are always so eager to leave the coop until they actually do, and then they regret it. This line talks not only about the lessons children learn, but also about that feeling of longing and regret felt when looking back on childhood. The last part of the poem brings the reader back to the present-day, and reveals Mr. Frost’s thoughts. He compares the troubles in life, particularly later life, to a bad walk through the woods-- “Where your face burns and tickles with cobwebs/ Broken across it, and one eye is weeping/ From a twigs having lashed it open.” At this point, the poem takes a turn for the somber, and Frost begins to talk about his desires to either go back to childhood or stop living. This poem was most likely written after Frost’s wife died, and at the time, it is no wonder death was also on his mind. Although there are many happy memories expressed in this piece, throughout the entire text, and especially at the end, there is subtext feeling of sadness, of looking back at childhood and knowing that it is over, and looking ahead at the future and seeing only a grim life followed by a grimmer death. When reading the poem, one cannot suppress the depressed feeling of hopelessness and yearning for a past that can never be again. Frost seems tired, as if all he wants to do is lay down and die. This is especially expressed in the end of the poem, “It’s when I’m weary of considerations,/ And life is too much like a pathless wood [...]/ I’d like to get away from Earth for awhile/ And then come back to it and begin over.”Yet although Frost wants to stop living the life he has, he doesn’t want to just leave life altogether. He wishes for a rebirth, a reincarnation of a sort. He wishes to find love again, so he can put the death of his first love behind him. Yet, he would rather live the life he is living than to be deprived of life altogether. “May no fate willfully misunderstand me/ And half grant what I wish and snatch me away/ Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:/ I don’t know where its going to go better.”As Frost says at the last line of the poem, “One could worse then be a swinger of birches.” This is the first optimistic phrase in the last part of the piece. You see that Frost has finally accepted aging and death, and now looks back on childhood as a time to remember and cherish, yet he still looks forward on life hopefully. This is a phrase all readers should take into their hearts-- be what you want to be, and love yourself for being you, and accept it. “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.”
Source:
http://plagiarist.com/poetry/688/comments/2/On "Birches"
Frank LentricchiaIn "Birches" (Mountain Interval, 1916) Frost begins to probe the power of his redemptive imagination as it moves from its playful phase toward the brink of dangerous transcendence. The movement into transcendence is a movement into a realm of radical imaginative freedom where (because redemption has succeeded too well) all possibilities of engagement with the common realities of experience are dissolved. In its moderation, a redemptive consciousness motivates union between selves as we have seen in "The Generations of Men," or in any number of Frost's love poems. But in its extreme forms, redemptive consciousness can become self-defeating as it presses the imaginative man into deepest isolation.
"Birches" begins by evoking its core image against the background of a darkly wooded landscape:
When I see birches bend to left and rightAcross the lines of straighter darker trees,I like to think some boy's been swinging them.But swinging doesn't bend them down to stayAs ice storms do.
The pliable, malleable quality of the birch tree captures the poet's attention and kicks off his meditation. Perhaps young boys don't bend birches down to stay, but swing them they do and thus bend them momentarily. Those "straighter, darker trees," like the trees of "Into My Own" that "scarcely show the breeze," stand ominously free from human manipulation, menacing in their irresponsiveness to acts of the will. The malleability of the birches is not total, however, and the poet is forced to admit this fact into the presence of his desire, like it or not. The ultimate shape of mature birch trees is the work of objective natural force, not human activity. Yet after conceding the boundaries of imagination's subjective world, the poet seems not to have constricted himself but to have been released.
Often you must have seen themLoaded with ice a sunny winter morningAfter a rain. They click upon themselvesAs the breeze rises, and turn many-coloredAs the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shellsShattering and avalanching on the snow crust--Such heaps of broken glass to sweep awayYou'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
Fascinated as he is by the show of loveliness before him, and admiring as be is of nature as it performs the potter's art, cracking and crazing the enamel of ice coating on the birch trees, it is not finally the thing itself (the ice-coated trees) that interests the poet but the strange association be is tempted to make: "You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen." Certainly there is no question of belief involved here. The linkage of the scientifically discredited medieval sphere with the heaps of cracked ice suggests rather the poet's need to break beyond the rigid standard of empirical truth, that he himself has already allowed into the poem, and faintly suggests as well the kind of apocalyptic destruction that the imagination seeks when unleashed (the idea that the inner dome has been smashed clearly pleases the speaker). Eventually Frost in "Birches" comes round to exploring in much more sophisticated ways the complex problem broached by this statement from a later poem, "On Looking Up By Chance At the Constellations":
The sun and moon get crossed, but they never touch,Nor strike out fire from each other, nor crash out loud.The planets seem to interfere in their curves,But nothing ever happens, no harm is done.We may as well go patiently on with our life,And look elsewhere than to stars and moon and sun For the shocks and changes we need to keep us sane.
In "Birches" Frost looks not to natural catastrophe for those "shocks and changes" that "keep us sane" but to his resources as a poet:
You may see their trunks arching in the woodsYears afterwards, trailing their leaves on the groundLike girls on hands and knees that throw their hairBefore them over their heads to dry in the sun.
Manipulating the simile, the overt figure of comparison, is a dangerous ploy for the poet, implying often that be does not have the courage of his vision and does not believe that his mode of language can generate a distinctive perspective on experience. For Frost, however, and for any poet who is rooted in what I call the aesthetics of the fiction., the simile is the perfect figure of comparison, subtler even than metaphor. Its overtness becomes its virtue: in its insistence on the disparateness of the things compared (as well as their likeness) it can sustain a divided vision; can at once transmute the birches--for a brief moment nature stands humanized and the poet has transcended the scientific universe--and, at the same time, can allow the fictive world to be penetrated by the impurities of experience that resist the transmutative process of imagination. It is at such moments as this in Frost's work that the strategies and motives of a poetry of play are revealed. There is never any intention of competing with science, and therefore, there is no problem at all (as we generally sense with many modern poets and critics) of claiming a special cognitive value for poetry. In his playful and redemptive mode, Frost's motive for poetry is not cognitive but psychological in the sense that he is willfully seeking to bathe his consciousness and, if the reader consents, his reader's as well, in a free-floating, epistemologically unsanctioned vision of the world which, even as it is undermined by the very language in which it is anchored, brings a satisfaction of relief when contemplated. It may be argued that the satisfaction is greatest when it is autonomous: the more firmly the poet insists upon the severance of his vision from the order of things as they are and the more clearly that be makes no claim for knowledge, the emotive power of the poem may emerge uncontaminated by the morass of philosophical problems that are bound to dog him should he make claims for knowledge. Both poet and reader may submerge themselves without regret (because without epistemological pretension) in aesthetic illusion.
But I was going to say when Truth broke inWith all her matter of fact about the ice storm,I should prefer to have some boy bend themAs he went out and in to fetch the cows--Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,Whose only play was what be found himself,Summer or winter, and could play alone.
The shrewdness in Frost's strategy now surfaces. While claiming to have paid homage to the rigid standards of empirical truth in his digression on the ice-loaded branches, what he has actually done is to digress into the language of fictions. When he turns to the desired vision of the young boy swinging birches, he is not, as he says, turning from truth to fiction, but from one kind of fiction to another kind of fiction: from the fiction of cosmic change and humanized nature to the fiction of the human will riding roughshod over a pliable external world. And the motives for all of this fooling? I think there are two: one is that Frost intends to fox his naturalistically persuaded readers; a second is that this is what his poem is all about--the thrusting of little fictions within alien, antifictive contexts.* As he evokes the image of the boy, playing in isolation, too far from the community to engage in a team kind of sport, he evokes, as well, his cherished theme of the imaginative man who, essentially alone in the world, either makes it or doesn't on the strength of his creative resources. And now he indulges to the full the desired vision that be could not allow himself in the poem's opening lines:
One by one he subdued his father's treesBy riding them down over and over againUntil he took the stiffness out of them,And not one but hung limp, not one was leftFor him to conquer. He learned all there wasTo learn about not launching out too soonAnd so not carrying the tree awayClear to the ground. He always kept his poiseTo the top branches, climbing carefullyWith the same pains you use to fill a cupUp to the brim, and even above the brim.Then be flung outward, feet first, with a swish,Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
One figure seems to imply another--the image of the farm youth swinging up, out, and down to earth again recalls the boyhood of the poet:
So was I once myself a swinger of birches. And so I dream of going back to be.It's when I'm weary of considerations,And life is too much like a pathless woodWhere your face burns and tickles with the cobwebsBroken across it, and one eye is weepingFrom a twig's having lashed across it open.
For anyone but Frost the "pathless wood" is trite. But for him it carries a complex of meaning fashioned elsewhere. The upward swinging of the boy becomes an emblem for imagination's swing away from the tangled, dark wood; a swing away from the "straighter, darker trees"; a swing into the absolute freedom of isolation, the severing of all "considerations." This is the transcendental phase of redemptive consciousness, a game that one plays alone. The downward movement of redemptive imagination to earth, contrarily, is a movement into community, engagement, love--the games that two play together:
I'd like to get away from earth awhileAnd then come back to it and begin over.May no fate willfully misunderstand meAnd half grant what I wish and snatch me awayNot to return. Earth's the right place for love:I don't know where it's likely to go better.I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk,Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,But dipped its top and set me down again.That would be good both going and coming back. One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
One really has no choice but to be a swinger of birches. In the moment when, catapulting upward, the poet is half-granted his wish, when transcendence is about to be complete and the self, in its disdain for earth, has lofted itself into absolute autonomy, nothing having any claim upon it, and no return possible, then, at that moment,, the blessed pull of the earth is felt again, and the apocalypse desired by a transcending imagination, which seemed so imminent, is repressed. At the end of "Birches" a precious balance has been restored between the claims of a redeeming imagination in its extreme, transcendent form, and the claims of common sense reality. To put it in another way, the psychic needs of change--supplied best by redemptive imagination--are balanced by the equally deep psychic need--supplied by skeptical ironic awareness--for the therapy of dull realities and everyday considerations.
* The swings in consciousness between fictive and objective worlds are reflected in a series of perfectly placed linguistic pivots. Consider: the conjunctive "but," lines 5, 21; or the conjunctive "and," lines 42, 49, 55; or the subtle semantic ambiguity of "shed" (line 10) and "trailing" (line 18) which points us simultaneously outward (in objective reference) to the inhuman world of nature--of birches as birches--and inward (expressive reference) to the warm, ambient world of Frost's consciousness, of bent birches as girls throwing their hair before them, drying in the sun.
from Robert Frost: Modern Poetics and the Landscapes of Self. Copyright © 1975 by Duke UP.
John C. Kemp
The philosophy articulated in "Birches" poses no threat to popular values or beliefs, and it is so appealingly affirmative that many readers have treasured the poem as a masterpiece. Among Frost's most celebrated works, perhaps only "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" ranks ahead of it. Yet to critics like Brooks and Squires, the persona's philosophical stance in "Birches" is a serious weakness.
[. . .]
The didactic and philosophical element that some critics have attacked strikes others as the very core of Frost's virtue.
[. . .]
Perhaps impartial observers can accept the notion that "Birches" is neither as bad as its harshest opponents suggest nor as good as its most adoring advocates claim.
[. . .]
"Birches" . . . contains three fairly lengthy descriptions that do not involve unusual perspectives. In fact, the most original and distinctive vision in the poem--the passage treating the ice on the trees (ll. 5-14)--is undercut both by the self-consciousness of its final line ("You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen") and by the two much more conventionally perceived environments that follow it: the rural boyhood of the swinger of birches (ll. 23-40) and the "pathless wood," which represents life's "considerations" (ll. 44-47). As a result, the poem's ardent concluding lines--its closing pronouncements on life, death, and human aspiration--do not arise from a particular experience. Instead, they are presented as doctrines that we must accept or reject on the basis of our credence in the speaker as a wise countryman whose familiarity with birch trees, ice storms, and pathless woods gives him authority as a philosopher.
Since in "Birches" the natural object--tree, ice crystal, pathless wood, etc.--functions as proof of the speaker's rusticity, Frost has no need for extraordinary perspectives, and therefore the poem does little to convince us that an "experience," to use [Robert] Langbaum's wording, "is really taking place, that the object is seen and not merely remembered from a public or abstract view of it." This is not to deny that the poem contains some brilliant descriptive passages (especially memorable are the clicking, cracking, shattering ice crystals in lines 7-11 and the boy's painstaking climb and sudden, exhilarating descent in lines 35-40), and without doubt, the closing lines offer an engaging exegesis of swinging birches as a way of life. But though we learn a great deal about this speaker's beliefs and preferences, we find at last that he has not revealed himself as profoundly as does the speaker in "After Apple-Picking." It is remarkable that the verb "to like," which does not appear in Frost's non-dramatic poetry prior to "Birches," is used three times in this poem: "I like to think" (l. 3); "I'd like to get away" (l. 48); and "I'd like to go" (l. 54). The speaker also tells us what he would "prefer" (l. 23), "dream of" (l. 42), and "wish" (l. 51). But while his preferences are generally appealing, and while they seem intellectually justified, they are not poetically justified in the sense that Langbaum suggests when he discusses the "extraordinary perspective" as a "sign that the experience is really taking place": "The experience has validity just because it is dramatized as an event which we must accept as having taken place, rather than formulated as an idea with which we must agree or disagree" (p. 43).
"Mending Wall," "After Apple-Picking," and "The Wood-Pile" are centered on specific events that involve the speaker in dramatic conflicts and lead him to extraordinary perspectives. The act of repairing the wall and trying to reason with the crusty farmer, the termination of the harvest and the preparation for a winter's rest, the vagrant woodland ramble and the discovery of the perplexing woodpile--all these are events that we indeed "accept as having taken place."
Unlike the meditative lyrics Frost selected for North of Boston, however, "Birches" does not present a central dramatized event as a stimulus for the speaker's utterance. Although the conclusion seems sincere, and although Frost created a persuasive metaphorical context for it, the final sentiments do not grow dramatically out of the experiences alluded to. Yes, the speaker has observed ice storms that bend the birches "down to stay" (l. 4); he has "learned all there is / To learn" about swinging birches (ll. 32-33); and he has struggled through the "considerations" of life's "pathless wood" (ll. 43-44). But the relationship of these experiences to his present utterance--the poem--is left unclear. We would be more willing to accept what Squires calls a "contradictory jumble" of images and ideas if we were convinced (as Eliot and Pound often convince us) that the diverse materials had coalesced in the speaker's mind. Frost's confession that the poem was "two fragments soldered together" is revealing; the overt, affected capriciousness of the transitions between major sections of the poem (ll. 4-5, 21-22, and 41-42) indicates that instead of striving to establish the dynamics of dramatized experience, he felt he could rely on the force of his speaker's personality and rural background. In early editions, a parenthetical question, "(Now am I free to be poetical?)," followed line 22, making the transition between the ice storm and the country youth even more arbitrary.
[. . .]
It may seem arbitrary to press too hard the issue of honesty in this poem. Art, after all, relies on fantasy and deception. Yet there are different types of fantasy and many motives for deception. If we are confident that an artist has kept faith with some personal vision or inner self, we can accept falsification of many things. When Frost presents himself as a farm worker, for instance a mower wielding his scythe or apple picker resting his weary body--the fantasy seems sincere and convincing. When we consider Frost's career and personal history, however, we may wonder about his motives in falsifying the character of his childhood. The resulting images lack originality and inspiration. Surely "Birches" contains some vivid and forceful passages, but when a line or phrase gives us too strong a sense of the poet's calculated effort to validate his speaker's rusticity, the spell of the poem, its incantatory charm and imaginative vision, is threatened. Fortunately, in "Birches" this threat is hardly noticeable, certainly not overwhelming or repellent, unless we want it to be.
[Excerpted from a longer analysis]
from Robert Frost and New England: The Poet as Regionalist. Copyright © 1979 by Princeton UP.
George Montiero
SEVERAL TIMES in Robert Frost: A Living Voice, his account of the poet's talks at the Bread Loaf School of English, Reginald L. Cook quotes Frost's remarks on "Birches." Frost's words on one such occasion are given a context by Cook, who writes:
In spite of his deprecatory view of explication, Frost revealed a good deal about his art. When he disclosed his feeling about certain words in "Birches," he gave a searching insight into what makes a poet's use of descriptive words stand up. And how cavalierly he did it! He offered "this little note on 'Birches' before I begin to read it. See. The kind of explication I forbid," he said self-consciously. Then with disarming slyness, he said: "I never go down the shoreline [from Boston] to New York without watching the birches to see if they live up to what I say about them in the poem." Invariably the listener laughed, but on the double take he realized that Frost, the careful craftsman, was confirming his assertion that birches bend to left and right by verification. Getting details right was a telling responsibility. His birches, he insisted, were not the white mountain or paper birch of northern New England (Betula papyrifera); they were the gray birch (Betula populifolia).
[. . . .]
The way in which Robert Frost came to write "Birches" is described by Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant: "As for the poet, 'who never saw New England as clearly as when he was in Old England,' he could not tie down his creative moments. It was about this time, early in 1914, while tramping the muddy yard at the Bungalow [West Midlands], that he suddenly; he says, wrote a new poem, not to be included in North of Boston. This was the now so famous and beloved 'Birches,' with its cold and crystal memories of another kind of wintry world." As this account suggests, Frost's poem might have reflected pure, almost spontaneous invention, but if so, it was stimulated by memories of boyhood experiences of winter and summer in northern New England and sharpened by the perspective of the poet's self-imposed exile. What I would suggest, however, is that in "Birches," even though Frost saw New England most clearly when he was in Old England, he re-viewed his wintry New England scene through Thoreauvian eyes.
On December 31, 1852, a day of rain and ice in Concord, Thoreau wrote in his Journals with keen anticipation: "It is a sort of frozen rain this afternoon, which does not wet one, but makes the still bare ground slippery with a coating of ice, and stiffens your umbrella so that it cannot be shut. Will not the trees look finely in the morning?" For the next few days Thoreau described the storm's "fine" effects upon the landscape. On the first day of the new year he observed: "This morning we have something between ice and frost on the trees. . . . What a crash of jewels as you walk! . . . The drooping birches along the edges of woods are the most feathery; fairy-like ostrich plumes of the trees, and the color of their trunks increases the delusion" (436-38). The next day Thoreau continued his report:
In this clear air and bright sunlight, the ice-covered trees have a new beauty, especially the birches . . . , bent quite to the ground in every kind of curve. At a distance, as you are approaching them endwise, they look like white tents of Indians under the edge ofthe wood. The birch is thus remarkable, perhaps, because from the feathery form of the tree, whose numerous small branches sustain so great a weight, bending it to the ground, and moreover because, from the color of the bark, the core is less observable. The oaks not only are less pliant in the trunk, but have fewer and stiffer twigs and branches. The birches droop over in all directions, like ostrich-feathers. [440]
Thoreau's description anticipates Frost's handling of imagery. But Thoreau's entry the next day offers an interesting variation on Frost's poem. He begins by recording that day's response to the observable beauty which can be attributed to nature's transforming and creative powers and then speculates on the comparative merits of man and nature. The first paragraph is largely descriptive of this "finest show of ice" (444): "Nothing dark met the eye, but a silvery sheen, precisely as if the whole tree—trunk, boughs, and twigs—were converted into burnished silver. You exclaimed at every hedgerow. Sometimes a clump of birches £ell over every way in graceful ostrich-plumes, all raying from one centre. . . . Suddenly all is converted to crystal. The world is a crystal palace" (445).
The next paragraph, however, moves into a new key. Stimulated by his last attempt at describing ice-laden birches, Thoreau ruminates:
I love Nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him. None of his institutions control or pervade her. There a different kind of right prevails. In her midst I can be glad with an entire gladness. If this world were all man, I could not stretch myself, I should lose all hope. He is constraint, she is freedom to me. He makes me wish for another world. She makes me content with this. . . .
Man, man is the devil,The source of evil . . . .
I have a room all to myself; it is nature. It is a place beyond the jurisdiction of human governments. . . . There are two worlds, the post-office and nature. I know them both. I continually forget mankind and their institutions, as I do a bank. [445-46]
The conjunction of Thoreau's celebration of winter birches and his buoyant homily on man's inferiority to nature may be compared with Frost's similar conjunction of themes in "Birches." If man makes Thoreau "wish for another world " but nature makes him "content with this," to Frost it is when life most resembles nature—when "life is too much like a pathless wood"—that the poet would "like to get away from earth awhile." Frost would "climb black branches up a snow-white trunk / Toward heaven," but he would come back, he quickly decides, for "Earth's the right place for love." Thoreau would undoubtedly endorse Frost's aphorism. But their initial agreement would evaporate, I suspect, if each were to explain precisely what he took the statement to mean. While Thoreau would most characteristically focus on love of nature, Frost would just as readily assert the claim of man's fundamental love for man. The distinction is notable.
In the Journal passages that I have quoted above, Thoreau (for the moment read "man") appears almost exclusively as an observer, never as a participant beyond the act of perception. It is as if in nature's pure realm man's existence were suspended. Whenever Thoreau does tell in these entries what men are doing, or what they have done, he invariably does so to admonish them. Consequently, when he "climb[s] the bank at Stow's wood-lot and come[s] upon the piles of freshly split white pine wood," he does not compliment the worker for his labor, as one might expect, but decides, rather, that the owner of the woodlot is "ruthlessly laying it waste" (441). And in the same entry, a page or so later, he comments on the ringing of bells: "The bells are particularly sweet this morning. I hear more, methinks, than ever before. How much more religion in their sound, than they ever call men together to! Men obey their call and go to the stove-warmed church, though God exhibits himself to the walker in a frosted bush today as much as in a burning one to Moses of old" (443). Even when man does something well (after all, bells are a human invention), he is singularly capable of misinterpreting his own message and betraying his most noble purposes. For Thoreau the beauty and divinity which exist at this moment are in the glazed birch and the frosted bush. They are most certainly not in men. Nature and nature's workings are at the center of creation. In these pages Thoreau reserves his approval for the landscape transformed by ice and snow and the few men who make an appearance intrude momentarily along nature's periphery.
In Frost's poem, however, values are weighted somewhat differently. Its first twenty lines are largely devoted to a description of the effect ice-storms have on birches:
[quotes ll. 1-20]
The details in these lines are precise and deceptively neutral. The entire passage contains nothing to suggest that nature is superior (or inferior) to man, nor are we to infer that the two are equal. As description these lines exemplify what Frost calls the "matter-of-fact" of "Truth." But Frost does not stop with the conclusion that ice storms, and not swinging boys, are the cause of birches bent "down to stay." He approaches, finally the idea that man's acts upon nature have their own meaning and beauty: approvingly Frost decides that, given a choice, he "should prefer to have some boy bend" birches. In the midst of swinging, boys are not observers of nature; they actually collaborate with nature by taking the "stiffness" out of birches. Frost would have a bent tree signify that some boy swinging from earth, has gone beyond that "pathless wood / Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs / Broken across it." "Birches" suggests that nature's beauty is somehow enhanced when man has worked an effect upon nature. In this sense Frost's poem may stand as a qualified reply to Thoreau's recurrent strain of illimitable nature worship.
Of course there is another side to Thoreau with which "Birches" does not conflict. A Thoreau more congenial to Frost appears in a Journal entry six months before the notable ice storm of December 31, 1852. He writes: "Nature must be viewed humanly to be viewed at all; that is, her scenes must be associated with humane affections, such as are associated with one's native place, for instance. She is most significant to a lover. A lover of Nature is preeminently a lover of man. If I have no friend, what is Nature to me? She ceases to be morally significant" (163). For Thoreau this kind of bravely humanistic sentiment welled forth most clearly on an early summer's day. The dead of winter, we have seen, could evoke other feelings. But Frost's humanism became a harder, more durable thing in its midwinter setting of ice and snow.
As late as August 1919, in a list of poems that his friend John T Bartlett might like to read, Frost recommended "Swinging Birches." In some ways it is unfortunate that Frost stopped calling the poem by this title. I say unfortunate because the activity at the heart of the poem—the activity that generates whatever cohesion the poem has—is the boy's swinging of birches and the poet's ruminations on the possibility that the birches he sees have been bent by boys at play. He would like to think that such is the case. But since liking to think does not make it so, the poet turns to the more likely reason, the permanent bending of birches by ice storms.
You may see their trunks arching in the woodsYears afterwards, trailing their leaves on the groundLike girls on hands and knees that throw their hairBefore them over their heads to dry in the sun.
Then, interrupting this train of thought—this "matter-of-fact" "Truth"—he returns to a consideration of the notion that by "swinging" them boys also bend trees (though not permanently, as ice storms do).
I should prefer to have some boy bend themAs he went out and in to fetch the cows—Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,Whose only play was what he found himself,Summer or winter, and could play alone.
Here the poem shifts into a generalized description, a semi-dramatic account of the way such a boy proceeds:
[quotes ll. 28-40]
At this point the poet acknowledges that he, too, was once "a swinger of birches," and he admits that even now he dreams of being one again. When does he have such dreams?
It's when I'm weary of considerations,And life is too much like a pathless woodWhere your face bums and tickles with the cobwebsBroken across it, and one eye is weepingFrom a twig's having lashed across it open.
To what sort of boyhood pleasure would the adult poet like to return? Quite simply; it is the pleasure of onanism. We do not need either Erica Jong or John Updike to remind us that "flying" is often a dream or linguistic substitute for sexual activity. But we do need to be reminded that "early orgasms at puberty induced by friction against a tree trunk" are "not an uncommon experience," to quote from a writer commenting on the following passage from the early diaries of James Boswell: "Already (age 12-13) in climbing trees, pleasure. Could not conceive what it was. Thought of heaven. Returned often, climbed, felt, allowed myself to fall from high branches in ecstasy—all natural. Spoke of it to the gardener. He, rigid, did not explain."
If physiologically there is some sort of pubescent sexuality taking place in the "swinging" of "birches," it is not surprising, then, that the boy has "subdued his father's trees" by "riding them down over and over again" until "not one was left for him to conquer" and that the orgasmic activity should be likened to "riding," which despite the "conquering" can be done time and again. One need only note that the notion of "riding," already figurative in "Birches," reappears metaphorically in Frost's conception of "Education by Poetry," wherein he writes: "Unless you are at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values: you don't know . . . how far you may expect to ride it and when it may break down with you." And what is true for metaphor and poetry is true for love. Frost insisted that a poem "run . . . from delight to wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting." Then it is totally appropriate within the metaphor of "swinging birches" that even the storm-bent trees should look to the adult male like "girls on hands and knees that throw their hair / Before them over their heads to dry in the sun." No wonder, then, and fully appropriate it is, that when the poet thinks that his wish to get away from earth might by some fate be misunderstood such that he be snatched away never to return, his thought is that "Earth's the right place vor love." At some level of his consciousness the pleasurable activity of "swinging birches" has transformed itself into the more encompassing term "love." One might say, within the logic of this reading of the poem, that "Earth's the right place for [sexual] love," including onanistic love. The same sexual metaphor runs through the final lines of the poem as the mature poet thinks of how he would like to go but only to come back.
[quotes ll. 54-59]
from Robert Frost and the New England Renaissance. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1988. Copyright © 1988 by the UP of Kentucky.
Guy Rotella
Although "Birches" describes a boy's game instead of a chore, it too has fact, dream, and in that intent game a commitment as deep as one of earnest love. Here Frost's comments on being at home in figurative values are most apt for his actual poetic images: knowing how to ride metaphor is analogous to knowing how to ride birches.
The facts about the ice storm in "Birches" grow the more and more figurative as the poet's imagined preference sounds real and prosaic. In the first lines, the poet associates a real scene with an image in his mind, and he deliberately distinguishes between the two. The casual assumption, "you must have seen them," makes his statements sound public and verifiable:
[quotes ll. 1-7]
What follows is by no means lifeless fact but an enchanting account. Not Just some ordinary woods, the enameled trees look as crafted and ornamental as fine glass sculpture, and the fallen ice evokes a mythical catastrophe:
[quotes ll. 7-13]
Again the poet knows metaphor's limits and implies that anyone knows them. The offhand "You'd think" shows how common it is to slip into expressions of fancy and fall back on shared myths about the heavens and earth.
The accurate description in the next lines also suggests possible metaphors :
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load, And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed So low for long, they never right themselves: You may see their trunks arching in the woods Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground . . .
After "withered," "bowed," and "years afterwards," I tend to picture old men bowed by life's burdens, but that is not the case. As part of our education in metaphor, we must learn that a visual image can take us in several directions. To the poet these trees are
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair Before them over their hands to dry in the sun.
The poet then circles back to his first image of the boy. That turn itself suggests something about the way one habitually thinks of truth and fact:
But I was going to say when Truth broke in With all her matter of fact about the ice storm . . .
"Truth" with a capital "T" is abstraction personified, a figurative value. She, a trusted absolute, it seems, and not the poet interrupts with these "facts"—"crystal shells" and "the inner dome of heaven." By implication, the poet prefers an untruth which does not deal in facts. His fancy, though, is down to earth. No idle, elvish tale here:
[quotes ll. 23-40]
Why is the game of this solitary boy so appealing and poignant? He never expresses his feelings, whether of joy, accomplishment, or adventure. His game, which leaves the birches limp, places him in no idyllic, pantheistic relation with nature, yet it redeems itself in part. The meaning of his actions is not explicit. As Frost once said, in poetry "We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections" ("Education by Poetry," p. 332). Here the hints and indirections tease us to make more of the parable. At the same time, something holds us back, an adherence to fact, perhaps, to orchises or apples or birches. The tease lies in the account of the boy's thoroughness and intentness in his sport. An air of dedication, purpose, and fulfillment hovers about "one by one," "over and over again," "not one . . . not one." The boy has power; he subdues and conquers. He understands perfectly how to maneuver the trees and fly from branches to ground. The predicates which convey this could preface some finality. "He learned all there was" and "he always kept his poise," themselves poised at the ends of lines, evoke the mastery and freedom of one who knows "all there is" about life. But the boy's wisdom, after its fling into the air, lands on something specific: "He learned all there was / To learn about not launching out too soon," "He always kept his poise / To the top branches." His knowledge is valid in that context, as truth in "Mowing" is valid in terms of the sun’s heat and the silence.
[....]
The swinger of birches, boy or poet, must know his own powers and know the strength of the trees and the strength of metaphor.
This parable is both history and dream:
[quotes ll. 41-53]
Unlike the boy among the birches, the poet is subdued by a "pathless wood." The form of his dream of release corresponds to the boy's physical action: getting away from earth to begin "over and over again."
In the last lines, the poet clearly uses the parable for its figurative value, and another of Frost's comments comes to mind: the aim of metaphor is "to restore you to your ideas of free will" ("Education by Poetry," p. 333). The poet's imagination, with metaphors which attend to longings and to real events, restores free will without distorting the truth. The trees are not bent by the boy; thinking that he changes the woods is the fiction. However, it seems someone really has climbed the trees and enjoyed a flight from sky to earth. By using metaphors which fuse fact and dream, the poet is no longer beaten back; and he recovers the freedom of the boy who knows all there is to know and who always kept his poise:
[quotes ll. 54-61]
In the end, dividing Frost's poetic images into fact, dream and both is impossible. Frost undermines such divisions in a manner both playful and serious, exploring slippery issues about the natures of perception, interpretation, reality and truth. His poems often illustrate the mind seeking out metaphor and meaning in some rural or domestic scene, testing different possibilities. They also show with varying degrees of irony the mind, language, and familiar, perhaps inherent, myths imposing themselves on a landscape. Or maybe the landscape imposes something on the mind. . . .
from "Comparing Conceptions: Frost and Eddington, Heisenberg and Bohr." In On Frost: The Best from American Literature. Ed. Edwin H. Cady and Louis J. Budd. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991. Copyright © 1991 by Duke UP. Orginally published in American Literature 59:2 (May 1987).
Mordecai Marcus
The discursive blank-verse meditation "Birches" does not, like "The Wood-Pile" and "An Encounter," center on a continuously encountered and revealing nature scene; rather, it builds a mosaic of thoughts from fragments of memory and fantasy. Its vividness and genial, bittersweet speculation help make it one of Frost's most popular poems, and because its shifts of metaphor and tone invite varying interpretation it has also received much critical discussion, not always admiring. The poem moves back and forth between two visual perspectives: birch trees as bent by boys' playful swinging and by ice storms, the thematic interweaving being somewhat puzzling. The birches bent "across the lines of straighter darker trees" subtly introduce the theme of imagination and will opposing darker realities. Then, almost a third of the poem describes how ice storms bend these trees permanently, unlike the action of boys; this scene combines images of beauty and of distortion. Ice shells suggest radiating light and color, and the trees bowed to the level of the bracken, suggest suffering, which is immediately lightened by the strange image of girls leaning their hair toward the sun as if in happy submission.
The fallen "inner dome of heaven" alludes to Shelley's "dome of many colored glass" (also alluded to in "The Trial By Existence") to suggest the shattering of the ideal into everyday reality. Frost's speaker then self-consciously breaks from his realistic but metaphorically fantasied digression to say he would prefer to have some boy bend the birches, which action becomes a symbol for controlled experience, as contrasted with the genial fatality of ice storms. The boy's fancied playfulness substitutes for unavailable companionship, making for a thoughtful communion with nature, which rather than teach him wisdom allows him to learn it. Despite the insistence on the difference between ice storms' permanent damage to birches and a boy's temporary effects, the boy subdues and conquers the trees. His swinging is practice for maintaining life's difficult and precarious balances.
The third part of the poem begins with a more personal and philosophical tone. The speaker claims to have been such a youthful swinger of birches, an activity he can go back to only by dreaming. The birch trees, probably both ice-bent and boy-swung, stand for the order and control missing from ordinary experience. The "considerations" he is weary of are conflicting claims that leave him disoriented and stung. The desire to "get away from earth," importantly qualified by "awhile," shows a yearning for the ideal or perhaps for the imaginative isolation of the birch swinger. His "I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree ... / Toward heaven" suggests leaving earth, but he reveals by his quick apologetic claim that he doesn't mean that. He wants to be dipped down again toward earth, but the pursuit of the ideal by going sounds like death, as his quick apology acknowledges. Frost does less in this poem than in "After Apple-Picking" to suggest a renewed pursuit of the ideal in life rather than a yielding to death. His main pursuit is continual balance between reality and ideality, but as John F. Sears and Radcliffe Squires point out, his vehicle for transcendence and his desire for nature to reinforce human intuition do not quite work.
From The Poems of Robert Frost: an explication. Boston: G.K. Hall and Co., 1991. Copyright © 1991 by Mordecai Marcus.
Jeffrey Meyers
"Birches" connects poetic aspiration and physical love. It begins with a fanciful image("I like to think") of a boy swinging on and bending birches. It then shifts to a brilliant description of ice-laden branches blown by the wind that "cracks and crazes [suggesting cracked glazes] their enamel." Inspired by medieval cosmology and by a famous passage from Shelley's "Adonais" (an elegy for Keats, about poetic power cut off in mid-career by death), Frost writes of all the broken ice-glass: "You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen." He then returns to the swinger-of-birches theme as the boy, like the future poet, launches out at the proper time, keeps his poise and climbs carefully. Swinging himself on the branches "Toward heaven," he'd
like to get away from earth awhile And then come back to it and begin over....
Earth's the right place for love:I don't know where it's likely to go better.
Opposing the Platonic view of idealized love, Frost believes Earth, not Heaven, is the right place because love should be physical and tested against the realities of life.
From Robert Frost: A Biography. Copyright © 1996 by Jeffrey Meyers.
Floyd C. Watkins
"Toward heaven" but never to, never all the way. Frost fears transcendence. Despite all the apparent moralizing ("earth's the right place for love"), this passage is one of the most skeptical in Frost. He contemplates a moment when the soul may become completely absorbed into a union with the divine. But he is earthbound, limited, afraid. No sooner does he wish to get away from earth than he thinks of "fate" - rather than God. And what might be a mystical experience turns into a fear of death, a fear that he would be snatched away "not to return." He rejects the unknown, the love of God, because he cannot know it, and he clings to the finite: "Earth's the right place for love."
From "Going and Coming Back: Robert Frost’s Religious Poetry." South Atlantic Quarterly (Autumn 1974).
George F. BagbyThe first twenty lines of "Birches" clearly hint at Promethean tendencies. The poem is set at that time of the natural year which most suggests imaginative stirrings: the springtime moment in the imagination's life when it begins to rouse itself from winter lethargy. Though immobilized by their wintry covering of ice, as the Eolian "breeze rises" the birches move "and turn many-colored / As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel." "Soon," warmed by the sun, they "shed crystal shells," like the human beings of "Sand Dunes" casting off dead external coverings to take on new shapes and new vitality. The evidences of that spiritual molting, as many have noted, echo the Promethean outreach of Adonais: "Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away / You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen." And, though the birches are permanently "bowed" by the ice storm, they remain suggestive of aspiration: "You may see their trunks arching in the woods / Years afterwards," still straining toward that inner dome of heaven.
In the poem's central fiction, Frost adroitly converts the birches from emblems of Promethean aspiration to emblems of natural fact conquered by that aspiration. Rather than an ice storm, the poet "should prefer to have some boy bend" the birches; this fictive explanation represents more clearly the central presence of human activity, and human domination of the natural ("One by one he subdued his father's trees"). The comparison used to describe the care which the boy takes in climbing to the very "top branches" of the birches—"climbing carefully / With the same pains you use to fill a cup / Up to the brim, and even above the brim "—reminds us that this is not only a poem about trees but a celebration of spiritual thirst.
But, in the last third of the poem, where he explicitly reads in the act of swinging birches a lesson for the governance of one's imaginative life, Frost draws back from the Prometheanism implied earlier in the poem: "I'd like to get away from earth awhile / And then come back to it and begin over." As that latter line suggests, the visionary assertion of "Birches" is ultimately less extreme than that of "Wild Grapes." As Richard Wilbur notes, the echoes of Shelley in this poem are ultimately used to argue against Shelley's Prometheanism: "’Birches,’ taken as a whole, is in fact an answer to Shelley's kind of boundless neo-Platonic aspiration" (113) .The famous closing lines of the poem clearly move toward a reconciliation of human aspiration and earthly reality .The poet hopes that "no fate" will "willfully misunderstand" him "And half grant what I wish and snatch me away / Not to return. Earth's the right place for love."
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree, And climb black branches up a snow-white trunkToward heaven, till the tree could bear no more, But dipped its top and set me down again. That would be good both going and coming back.
The proper role of the mind or spirit is seen here, not as a conquest of the natural, not as a transcending of earth or a "steering straight off after something into space," but as an integral part of a larger process of give and take, "launching out" and return. The young girl in "Wild Grapes," because of her "not knowing anything" about "letting go," about accommodating natural fact, is carried off by the birch in that poem like a fish caught by a fish pole. The mature speaker of "Birches," on the other hand, knows how to use natural fact to reach its uppermost limits, to climb "Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more," but then to accept the end of the trip and be returned by the tree in a kind of cooperative effort. The imagination here again asserts its freedom and autonomy by dominating natural fact; but then, refreshed by that flexing of imaginative muscle, it "comes back" to natural fact to "begin over," now willing to accept the different but also "almost incredible freedom," as Frost puts it elsewhere, of being "enslaved to the hard facts of experience" (Letters 179).
Such a return or reconciliation would, for Blake or Shelley, amount to surrender. But Frost, like most other American nature writers, does not posit Blake's or Shelley's kind of inevitable struggle to the death between imaginative perception and natural fact. Like Thoreau (with certain exceptions), like Emerson in his more restrained moods, Frost believes that, in the final analysis, the two forces are capable of cooperating to achieve meaning.
From Frost and the Book of Nature. Copyright © 1993 by The University of Tennessee Press.
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