This article launches a "Tricked by" series, which will report and comment on passages from writers who have been tricked by Frost and other poets.
Many times when writers misinterpret poems, they demonstrate more about themselves than they do about the poem. They are guilty of “reading into a poem” that which is not there on the page but is, in fact, in their own minds.
First Installment of “Tricked by”
Frost claimed that his poem “The Road Not Taken” was a tricky poem, but he knew that any one of his poems was likely to trick the over-interpreter or the immature reader.
About the following lines from Robert Frost’s “Birches,” “One by one he subdued his father's trees / By riding them down over and over again / Until he took the stiffness out of them, / And not one but hung limp, not one was left / For him to conquer. He learned all there was / To learn about not launching out too soon,” writer Elizabeth Gregory claims: “The lexical choices used to describe the boy’s activities are unmistakeably sexual and indicate that he is discovering more than a love of nature.”
In the mind of the beholder, not on the page
Gregory’s inference of sexuality from these lines demonstrates the interpretive fallacy of “reading into” a poem something that is not there, and her assertion that “the boy’s activities are unmistakeably (sic) sexual” strains reason. The “lexical choices” to which Gregory refers are, no doubt, the words “riding,” “stiffness,” “hung limp,” and “launching out too soon.”
Thus we are asked to believe that Robert Frost wants readers to envision a tall birch tree as a metaphor for a penis: at first the “tree/penis” is “stiff/ready for sex”, and after the boy ”rides them/has intercourse with them,” they hang “limp/are satiated.” And from riding the birches, the boy learns to inhibit “launching out too soon/premature ejaculation.” It should be obvious that this is a ludicrous scene that borders on the obscene.
But because all of these terms refer quite specifically to the trees, not to the male genitalia or sexual activity, and because there is nothing else in the poem to make the reader understand them to be metaphorical, the thinker who applies a sexual interpretation is quite simply guilty of reading into the poem that which is not there.
Gregory not alone
Gregory is not the only critical thinker to be tricked by Frost’s “Birches.” George Montiero writes: “To what sort of boyhood pleasure would the adult poet like to return? Quite simply; it is the pleasure of onanism.” One is, quite simply, coaxed to counter: “Mr. Montiero, speak for yourself.”
Other Frost articles:
- Frost’s “The Witch of Coös”: Bones in the Attic
- Farmer/Poet Frost: Analysis of Robert Frost’s “Putting in the Seed”
- Robert Frost’s Golden Moments: “Nothing Gold Can Stay”
- Frost’s “Birches”: Going Toward Heaven
- 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
