![]() “And they seem not to break though once they are bowed/ So low for long, they never right themselves” ![]() ” But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay/ As ice-storms do.” He longed for the thrill and resilience of his boyish aspirations, discoveries and conquests. This poem about wistful remembrances of climbing slender birches to their tops and swinging gently back to ground is tense with yearning for innocence and an unencumbered youthful enthusiasm in a world weighed down by adult responsibilities, drudgery and restrictive realities which have subdued his spirit and bent his dreams like the ice-storms have the birches. He had the tremendous gift of transforming simple, memorable experiences into profound thoughts. As he swings between joys experienced, the realities of being earth-bound, and the mysteries of life, Frost ignites imaginations, ushers us back to treasured places, and gives a nod to ultimate things. At one point Frost states, “ But I was going to say when Truth broke in”. “So was I once myself a swinger of birches/ And so I dream of going back to be”īut it is more than nostalgic verse. He demonstrates a balance in life, the g.Robert Frost’s “Birches” has been a long time favorite of mine, probably because it conjures up some special childhood memories of swinging on birches. The speaker expresses life as a never-ending journey of sadness and misery mixed with happiness. The speaker reinforces his ties to earth by saying the world is the right place for love even though his face burns and one eye is weeping. For a boy climbing a tree is fun and games but for an adult, it is a way of a transcendent escape, and the speaker expresses a wish to "get away from earth awhile and then come back to it and begin over." The speaker does not want his wishes to be half fulfilled and die, he believes that earth is the best place for love and doesn't know where it's likely to go better, and that doesn't give much hope and faith in a happier afterlife. A boy swinging on the birches is the speaker's way of escaping life and to "get away from earth awhile." The speaker dreams of returning to the times when he had once been a swinger of birch trees when he's "weary of considerations and life is too much like a pathless wood." When one is stuck in a pathless wood, one way to navigate is to climb trees. The speaker uses the examples of ice storms to symbolize aspects of real-life situations that humans undergo. ![]() The ice storms represent the truth and reality that the speaker tries to escape from. The speaker of the poem expresses his thoughts of how he likes to think that birches are bent because "some boy's been swinging them." In the first stanza, the speaker is interrupted in his thoughts to explain how the ice storms turn the trees. ![]() ![]() The speaker likens birch swinging to "getting away from the earth awhile." Even though he knows that birches are bent by ice storms, he prefers his nostalgic vision of a boy climbing a tree and riding to the ground. At the sight of bent birch trees, he likes to think that it is because boys have been swinging on them. In Robert Frost's poem "Birches," the narrator reminisces about the times he had swung on trees and dreams of going back to those days. ![]()
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