Poetry Overview – Birches by Robert Frost by Robert Frost
The central aspect of Robert Frost’s poem, “Birches,” focuses strangely enough, on the birch trees themselves. Every metaphor or statement the speaker makes is centered on the trees, whether specific ones in front of him or the more abstract idea of birch trees in general. One interesting such statement occurs in the opening lines, where the speaker describes seeing “birches bend to left and right” (1561). He “like[s] to think some boy’s been swinging them/But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay/As ice storms do” (1561).
From the very beginning, we have a statement of both lost childhood and the disconnect between one’s dreams and one reality. The sight of the bent trees pleasantly reminds the speaker of the joy and exuberance of youth, of the days when he was free to spend his days “swinging” birches and enjoying life. Yet at the same time, he is all too aware of how reality tends to win out over imagination. He knows that, most likely, the bent trunks and branches came about as a result of an “ice storm”, rather than any rambunctious youth.
The world has taken something he holds dear, something he associates with youth and childhood, and turned it into, quite literally, a cold product of nature. This is why the speaker goes on to state, many lines down, that he “should prefer to have some boy bend them” (1561). What is curious however, is that although he is quite aware that it was an ice storm that bent the trees, the speaker nevertheless goes on to create an entire narrative of the imaginary boy who bent them.
He states “I was going to say when Truth broke in/With all her matter of fact about the ice storm” (1561) before telling the backstory of some young boy who bent the birches “As 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” (1562). This story goes on for many more lines, where we learn of how the boy would “play alone” (1562) and “one by one subdued his father’s trees/By riding them down over and over again” (1562). Why do this? Why create this elaborate account of a boy who, in all likelihood, does not exist?
The answer comes some twenty lines later, where the speaker states “So was I once a swinger of birches/And so I dream of going back to be” (1562). The speaker has moved on, leaving childhood behind, but adulthood is tiring and full of responsibilities. Imagining this young boy allows the speaker to vicariously live out his time as a child again, giving him a brief escape from the work and responsibilities of adult life. He states “It’s when [he’s] weary of considerations” (1562) that he dreams of “going back to be” a swinger of birches.
It is when “life is too much like a pathless wood” (1562) that the speaker dreams of childhood, when all the responsibilities, stresses, and duties start piling up that the speaker yearns to swing birches once more. This is an important distinction. It is not that adulthood and maturity are in of themselves difficult, but rather that childhood is that much simpler. The problem is that one can only appreciate it after the fact, when one knows how much is ahead of them. It is a strange paradox that one never enjoys childhood so much as when they have already left it.
Frost references this when he writes “I’d like to get away from earth awhile/And then come back to it and begin over” (1562). In the end, the speaker misses the freedom symbolized by swinging birches, the ability to leave the “pathless wood” and climb a tree, if only for a little while. Yet what of the action central to the poem, the actual swinging of the birch itself? Where does this fit into Frost’s overall message? We have already seen how he lays out the conflict between the reality of adult life, and the memory of the carefree days of childhood.
What Frost adds into this mix, however, is the idea that “adulthood” is more of an ideal than anything, a place that nobody ever really reaches. Rather, it is something that we all strive for, a constant struggle to gain a stable, successful, and dependable life for ourselves. We all are climbing birch trees, ascending ever higher towards what we believe to be “adulthood”. We are in between the roots of the tree, the reassuring stability of real life, and the feeling of limitless possibilities, free from reality, which can be found by swinging out into space. Nostalgia occupies a strange place in our collective consciousness.
We all seem to have the same sense that things were better “back then”, without ever defining when “then” really was. As a result, we magnify the good parts of our pasts, making them out to be much better than they were in reality. In particular, childhood has taken its place in our minds as the very definition of “the good old days”, mostly because we know things now we didn’t know back then. We didn’t know how hard it was to be an astronaut, how much work high school and college really were, how much stress and responsibility really existed outside our elementary school walls.
Yet at the same time, childhood was, for many people, a great experience. It is one of the few life experiences common to everyone that is “good both going and coming back” (1562), as Frost puts it. We might not be children anymore, but life is still pretty good, all things considered. Although the speaker in “Birches” does indeed wish to return to his tree swinging days, he recognizes that “Earth’s the right place for love/I don’t know where it’s likely to go better” (1562).
It is all well and good to think back on our childhoods and wish we could return, but not to the point where we forget to live our lives as they are now. Still, when things get tough, when money gets tight, when the boss calls you into their office, when the baby wakes you up at three in the morning, sometimes all you can do is close your eyes and imagine climbing that birch tree once more, climbing along the tallest knotted branch, and swinging out into space, swinging you back to when the days were long, the birches were unbent, and anything was possible.