Poetry Birches Summary & Analysis by Robert Frost
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Introduction
"Birches" is a poem written by the American poet Robert Frost. Frost's capacity to bring the philosophy of life into common realism is best displayed by this poem.
Largely influenced by the modernist stances of WB Yeats and Thomas Hardy, Frost can show how a human reacts to the universality of Nature especially in an untouched rural setting.
This poem is a perfect example of Frost's use of conversational language to describe the simplicity of nature i.e. birches and the abstract meanings in it.
The poem is written in Blank verse which means metrical sentences without any rhyme scheme.
Summary
The poem begins like the poet is in a candid conversation. He describes that seeing birches bending to left and right makes him think of some boy who swings in them.
When a boy swings in birches, the process reverses when he comes down but the bending of birches due to ice-storms is not the same. Ice storms bend them down to stay. He reminds us how on a sunny winter morning, we can often see birches loaded with ice after a rain.
The poet minutely observes how the rising breeze cracks the glazed surface made over the birches by snow. The warmth which comes from the sun starts melting the ice covering those birches. Ice starts falling like crystal shells and shattering together to create an avalanche.
They look like heaps of broken glass and their sharp sound of crashing makes one think as if the inner dome of heaven has fallen.
A load of fallen ice on them brings them down to the withered bracken, a kind of fern growing on the ground. They remain bowed for so long without straightening themselves once.
The poet describes how one can see them years later in the woods with their leaves touching the ground. A beautiful image of girls throwing their hair over their heads while they are on their hands and knees to dry in the sun is sketched here to compare it with the birches lowering their leaves to the ground.
The poet enters into a reverie about a rural image of the boy going out to fetch cows. He says that when ice storms do that to birches, he'd like such a boy to bend them while doing such housework.
It reminds him of the loneliness of such a boy which is probably the loneliness of the poet's own childhood. Such a boy goes on bringing down the branches of birches by swinging on them one after another which looks like bringing the stiffness out of them.
For the poet, it is to conquer their stiffness one after another and bring them under control or subdue. He wonders how such a boy learns how to swing in such a way that the tree clearly doesn't come down to the ground, he climbs carefully and keeps his poise.
Climbing to the top of the birches is like filling a cup carefully up to the brim and even above the brim which is very vulnerable to slip out yet it can be achieved. Then the boy holds the birch with his hand and throws feet outward and come down swiftly making a whistling sound in the air.
The poet then remembers suddenly that as a child he was a swinger of birches too. He dreams of going back to become so again. He does it when he is tired of life and its hard decisions which one needs to make.
Tired of such considerations, life becomes a pathless wood for him. The very realistic description of losing amidst the wood and climbing a birch becomes metaphorical.
The life becomes very hard at times like one's face is burning and tickling with the cobwebs broken across it. The poet describes the hard skills of climbing a tree when a twig occasionally bruises against one's eye causing it to weep. It is very much like life's hardships.
The poet is tired of life's such trails and at times he wishes to get away from earth awhile so that he can come back to it later and begin everything afresh. He is not saying that he wants to go away for always.
He prays that may no fate wilfully misunderstands this wish of him to get away from earth. He gives a strong statement that Earth is the right place for love. He is not sure whether there is another better place than this.
So, such a wish to get away for a while from the earth and come down to it is very similar to climbing on a birch tree whose snow-white trunk feels like climbing toward heaven.
When the tree can't bear him anymore, it'll dip its top and bring him down to the ground again. For a while, he will get fresh. It feels very good to go up and come back again. It is the best alternative the poet can put forward on the face of life's hardships and he says that one could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
Analysis
Birches is a nature poem written by Robert Frost. Frost is one of the most important American poets who shaped the voice of generations to come. This poem was first published in the collection "Mountain Interval" and has been since anthologized always.
Judith Oster said whether in "Birches" we divide the experience of the poem from the meaning of the poem? And the answer is that we do not. The poem opens in a conversational way which is a trademark of Robert Frost.
It is written in Blank Verse which means sentences are metrical but without any rhyme. The 59 lines of this poem exemplify poetic concepts of Robert Frost such as "education by metaphor" "a momentary stay against confusion" and "sound of sense."
The poem is set in a rural world of contemplation. The realistic portrayal of Nature such as the birches here is injected with symbolic meanings. In one of his Preface, Frost wrote that "Abstraction is an old story with the philosophers, but it has been like a new toy in the hands of the artists of our day."
He was fully occupied with how everything sounds as. This poem defamiliarizes words to surprise us with their sounds as if we are hearing them for the first time. Frost himself said that "I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense."
This poem discusses a simple thought of birches bent under the snowfall and boys swinging in their branches but the immaculate way of composition allows us to experience the abstract vitality of our speech which is "pure sound-pure form."
The poem employs everyday speech like a person in his thoughts and reflections is gossiping about his past and the hardships of life in a very intimate way.
The poet enjambs single sentences over many lines which gives a dramatic power to the poem. It looks like the whole poem which looks so simple is actually carved around the nature of ideas and sounds which are there.
Frost said poetry is simply made of metaphor. This poem may deal with the description of birches in winter and the playfulness of young boys but the irony comes out of the fact that the whole description, in the end, looks like a metaphor. Reading the poem gives us "the pleasure of ulteriority."
The poem educates us towards its end. It suggests us a way to deal when our life becomes a pathless wood. Birches were personified in the beginning of the poem as if they have life but, in the end, they become the tools of the boys who are alive. One can not expect the way the poet teaches us that the earth's the right place for love.
The poem, in Frost's own words, moves us to a higher plane of regard. There is an allusion to Shelley's Adonais when it reads, such heaps of broken glass you'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
In an overall sense, the poem cannot be categorized simply as a nature poem. Frost said that "I am not a nature poet. There's always something else in my poetry."
The poem teaches us that how one can not escape from life's trials. One can only go away for a while and in a way recharge oneself spiritually and come back again to this world to act on responsibilities.
