Frost's Birches

Going Toward Heaven

Sep 14, 2007 Linda Sue Grimes

Robert Frost 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."

“Birches” consists of sixty lines, divided into two verse paragraphs of 41 and 19 lines. This poem is unrimed free verse, which Frost did not wholly endorse. He claimed that writing free-verse was like playing tennis without a net.

First Verse Paragraph

In the first verse paragraph, the speaker comments on the way birches bend. When he sees them bend, he likes “to think some boy's been swinging them.” Instead of telling the reader immediately why he likes to think that, the speaker next comments on the nature of birches that have been bent: “But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay. / Ice-storms do that.”

He continues describing the ice on birches on a “sunny winter morning”: “They click upon themselves.” Then the sun makes them “shed crystal shells.” They shatter and avalanche “on the snow-crust.” He likens the ice-shards to “broken glass to sweep away.” Then he makes the startling claim that “You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.”

In lines 15 and 16, he claims that under the pressure of winter ice “once they are bowed / So low for long,” they never right themselves.” This claim harkens back to the beginning where he claimed that boys bending the birches do not permanently “bend them down to stay.” He further supports his claim about ice-storm bent birches: “You may see their trunks arching in the woods / Years afterwards.”

He paints a graceful description of how these birches look: “trailing their leaves on the ground / Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair / Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.” This fascinating image seems to startle the speaker back to his beginning topic, which is about boys swinging in birches. The reader then remembers that the opening claim is that he likes to think that boys have been swinging in the birches, after he sees the birches swaying.

But he was sidetracked because “Truth broke in / With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm.” And he inserts a parenthetical remark: “(Now am I free to be poetical?)” He then dramatizes his reason for preferring to think that some boy had been swinging on the birches.

He likes to imagine that some farm boy who has to go out to fetch the cows, some country boy who has to play alone both summer and winter has discovered the joy of swinging on birches: “Some boy too far from town to learn baseball, / Whose only play was what he found himself.” Then he gives a detailed description of just how the boy learned to bend the birches or “subdue[] his father’s trees.” The drama of swinging on the birches takes on a philosophy of life which the speaker portrays in the second verse paragraph.

Second Verse Paragraph

The speaker is on a nostalgic-looking-back-at-childhood trip: “So was I once myself a swinger of birches; / And so I dream of going back to be.” Yet the dream is much more than a mere wish to go back. He says, “I'd like to get away from earth awhile / And then come back to it and begin over.” He’d like to start his life all over again, because he has become “weary of considerations” and his life is “too much like a pathless wood/ Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs / Broken across it.” He portrays his worldly duties and cares as the annoyances one faces while walking in woods.

But at the same time, he fears the idea of going away and coming back: “May no fate wilfully misunderstand me / And half grant what I wish and snatch me away / Not to return.” Somewhat superstitiously, he invokes “fate” not to take him too seriously. He’s only surmising possibilities, because he still believes quite practically that “Earth’s the right place for love: / I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.” Maybe there is place where it could go better, but since he does not know enough about that place, he’d rather just stay on the Earth as long as he can.

Still, he’d like get the chance to climb a birch tree again “Toward heaven” if not “to” heaven.” He’s confident that he can go toward heaven on a birch tree and then come back to Earth again—unlike actually going to “heaven” from where he remains uncertain of return. He does like the idea of swinging on birches and finally asserts: “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.”

Other Frost articles:

• Robert Frost: A Lone Wolf
• Frost’s ‘The Oven Bird’
• Frost’s "Mending Wall"
• Frost’s Snow and Woods
• Robert Frost’s Tricky Poem
• Robert Frost’s "Bereft": Hissing Leaves

The copyright of the article Frost's Birches in Poetry is owned by Linda Sue Grimes. Permission to republish Frost's Birches in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

Birches