ANALYSIS OF “BIRCHES”

"Birches" is one of Robert Frost's most popular and beloved poems. Yet, like so much of his work, there is far more happening within the poem than first appears.

"Birches" was first published in the Atlantic Monthly in August of 1915; it was first collected in Frost's third book, Mountain Interval, in 1916. "Birches," with its formal perfection, its opposition of the internal and external worlds, and its sometimes dry wit, is one of the best examples of everything that was good and strong in Frost's poetry.

The main image of the poem is of a series of birch trees that have been bowed down so that they no longer stand up straight but rather are arched over. While the poet quickly establishes that he knows the real reason that this has happened—ice storms have weighed down the branches of the birch trees, causing them to bend over—he prefers instead to imagine that something else entirely has happened: a young boy has climbed to the top of the trees and pulled them down, riding the trees as they droop down and then spring back up over and over again until they become arched over. This tension between what has actually happened and what the poet would like to have happened, between the real world and the world of the imagination, runs throughout Frost's poetry and gives the poem philosophical dimension and meaning far greater than that of a simple meditation on birch trees.

Robert Frost's Birches is 59 lines of blank verse, or unrhymed iambic pentameter, that divides into three sections. The first 20 lines graphically describe the slender, flexible trees and how they may become bent temporarily by "some boy's . . . swinging [on] them" or permanently by ice storms.

As early as line 1 we see the poet employing the kinds of devices that raise blank verse to a level above prose: the interior rhyme of "When" and "bend, the short "e"s of those words assonating with "left": the assonant vowel-sounds in "I" and "right." Further along Those long "i" sounds already mentioned are heard again in the repeated pronoun I and "ice," and the alliterative "l's" of "lines . . .like . . .Loaded" become an ear-pleasing pattern. That's all I will point out about the vowel and consonant music of this wondrous poem so that I can keep this article under the length limit.

This first movement of the poem is descriptive, and the visual and auditory images stand out clealy even to one who has never experienced an ice storm, much less had an opportunity to be a swinger on birches.

. . . Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-coloured
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel

No, Mr. Frost, I have never seen them, but I feel I have thanks to the resonant clarity of your verse. I now visualize them and hear the sounds of their clicking in the wintry breeze, the clacking and crazing of their ice coatings that you compare to brittle enamel. I feel I'm experiencing a New Hampshire winter. I'm a little less chilly as I read about the sun's warmth and see with my mind's eye the

. . .shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow crust.

I picture the glistening fragments as "heaps of broken glass to sweep away" as though "the inner dome of heaven had fallen." Meanwhile the lovely trees with their white trunk bark and black branches bend under their winter weight to the level of the ferny bracken, performing a deep obeisance from which they never resurrect themselves. The picture is made even clearer by this segment-concluding simile comparing the birches to "girls on hands and knees that throw their hair/Before them over their heads to dry in the sun."

With the second movement of our visual and musical composition, arrives a shift from factual observation to fanciful imaginings. Line 21 talks about what the speaker had intended to say had he not been interrupted by Truth. Truth here is not so much a poetic personification as it is a way to avoid some hackneyed phrase like "as a matter of fact."

The speaker knows what ice storms do to birches, but he prefers to think the bending of the trees was done by "some boy" going to do his chore of fetching the cows. Farm boys in remote locations can't join Little League baseball teams so they find their own ways to exercise and entertain themselves. They don't swing baseball bats but they become swingers on birches. They climb the slender trees to their topmost height where the branches can no longer bear the weight and must bend toward the ground where the swingers can let go and drop a short distance to the earth rather than having to climb back down as they would were it a sturdy oak or other such tree..

The imagined boy becomes more and more real as the poet, clearly drawing on abilities he learned as a boy, describes in detail the exact height to which to climb, the flinging outward, "feet first, with a swish,/ Kicking his way down through the air to the ground." By this time we have nearly forgotten the "matter-of-fact that the permanent bends in birch trees are not caused by playful boys but by ice storms.

Movement three begins at line 41.

So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.

Grown men do not amuse themselves with children's activities. When Frost or his speaker dreams of going back to that stage of life, swinging on birches accrues symbolic meaning. Climbing this kind of tree stands for getting away from the workaday matters of life on the ground and then coming back with a renewed, refreshed spirit. We hear the negativity of

. . . when I'm weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twigs' having lashed across it open.

"Don't misunderstand me," he says. Although I described tree climbing as ascending "toward heaven," notice that I have italicized "toward" for purposes of emphasis. This is no death wish. I want to be returned to the ground as was the boy in movement two because

. . . .Earth's the right place for love:

I don't know where it's likely to go better.

Despite the simplicity and conversational tone of this homely piece of Americana, there appears to be a literary allusion in the lines

May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return.

This business of wishes half granted and half denied struck a chord and caused me to research classical literature I have not read since my undergraduate days.

In Homer's Iliad, Achilles prays that Patroclus recapture the Greeks ships that have fallen into the hands of the Trojans and return safely from that dangerous mission. Here are the lines:

Great Jove consents to half the chief's request,

But heaven's eternal doom denies the rest;
To free the fleet was granted to his prayer:
His safe return, the winds dispersed in air.

Patroclus does manage to recapture the ships, but he is slain by Hector in so doing. Achilles' wish is only half granted.

The same thing happened in Virgil's Aeneid when a Trojan hero prays to Apollo that he be victorious in battle and return home safely.

Apollo heard, and granting half his pray'r,
Shuffled in winds the rest, and toss'd in empty air.

In Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock, the gods also grant half wishes. The hero who wishes to abscond permanently with the lock of fair Belinda's hair and possess it forever. However,

The pow'rs gave ear, and granted half his pray'r,

The rest, the wind dispers'd in empty air.

Pope in his mock epic was certainly alluding to Achilles' prayer, the similar prayer in the Aeneid, and the proverbial ill wind that blows no one good.

Though Frost's poem appears optimistic, it still rings with whiplashes across the open eye and the pathlessness of the wood of life. Think of the grimness of "Out, Out" where an injured boy dies and people shrug and turn to their own affairs. Frost's world is made up of "Fire and Ice.," not sweetness and light. Think of the malevolent deity in his "Design," the bleakness of "Desert Places," the "Something there is that doesn't love a wall," the excruciating pain mingled with emotional and sexual dysfunction in "Home Burial." If you like unequivocally happy endings, choose a different poet.