Birches Summary A man is walking through the woods, looking at the top of the tree line.

He sees some trees swaying in the wind and he starts to imagine things about the trees. He thinks about how the ice covering the trees cracks when they bend. Then he thinks about how heavy ice and snow will bend thin trees to the ground. This gets him imagining a boy climbing to the top of trees and bending them down until he can let go and fall safely to the ground. He remembers doing this when he was a kid and wishes that when he felt trapped in his adult life he could climb trees. This memory makes him feel like life isn't a trap, because his youthful imagination can free him at any moment. Lines 1-3 To begin with, we notice that the speaker is speaking in the first person to an imaginary audience. Birches are trees with slender trunks and bark that peels off like paper. They can grow up to 50 feet tall. Because birches have thin trunks, they bend pretty easily in the wind and under the weight of snow. Also, some types of birches have white bark, so they stand out against "straighter darker trees." When the speaker sees the birch trees bent to the ground, he imagines that a young boy was "swinging them." We can imagine that a birch would be bent a little after the swinging. Lines 4-7 How would you swing on a birch tree? Would you grab a hold of the trunk and move spiral around it? From these lines we do that learn that whatever it is, swinging bends the tree down to the ground. But, swinging doesn't bend the tree enough to cause permanent damage like an ice-storm can. During an ice-storm, the tree is covered with freezing rain. The rain coats the tree in a sheet of ice that is formed during a cold winter night. The speaker expects you to have experienced this first-hand, but if you haven't we can assure you it is pretty cool to see the sun reflect off the ice. Here's a picture to help you visual what trees look like after an ice-storm.

Lines 7-9 Not only does this sight of bending birches look beautiful, but a little wind can bump the ice-covered branches against each other, causing clicking sounds. Now we're involving senses besides sight (i.e., hearing). This clicking action cracks the ice, but not all the way. A "craze" is a poetic way of describing little cracks. They might look like veins or a small crack in a windshield that resembles a spider web. "Enamel" is a glassy outer surface. You might have seen it on pottery, like a hand-made coffee mug, or you might have heard a dentist talk about tooth enamel. Either way, when we see the word, "enamel," we think of something that's hard, shiny, and glossy. In this case, the enamel is the coating of ice. Lines 10-12 When the sun gets hotter during the day, the ice covering the trees starts to melt. It doesn't just melt like snow though. The ice is "cracked and crazed," so when it starts to melt, the bits of ice between those cracks break and fall off the trees. The speaker is using dramatic language to get you into the feeling of experience. He compares the breaking ice to shattering crystal and glass that falls like an avalanche. snow is crusty, because the sun has melted the top layer of snow the day before The and the cold night made it freeze hard again. The shattered ice collects below the tree as if it were a pile of glass being swept into a dustpan. Line 13 There are a couple of important things going on in this line. "Dome" calls up a number of interesting connotations. Early Judeo-Christian thinkers believed that the sky was a dome that separated heaven and earth. The idea of a dome also brings to mind the ceilings of some cathedrals and churches. Emily Dickinson took this idea and combined it with nature. In her poem "Some keep the Sabbath going to church," she writes how Nature is her church and she has exchanged an "Orchard, for a Dome." This falling dome business is another allusion. This time we can trace it to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan." Check out lines 45-49: That with music loud and long, I would build that dome in air,

That sunny dome! those caves of ice! And all who heard should see them there, And all should cry, Beware! Beware! The emperor Kubla Khan had this icy, heavenly pleasure-dome built. Like all good things, however, it didn't last. By connecting "Birches" to "Kubla Khan," we might expect "Birches" to be a bittersweet poem, perhaps about other things that don't last. Lines 14-16 The trees are bent down under the weight of ice and snow until they reach the shrubs and ferns (a.k.a. "bracken") on the ground below. To the speaker, the birches don't crack or craze like the ice. They bend, rather than break. However, the word "seem" should tip you off that this might not be the case. When the trees are bent down for the entirety of a New England winter, they don't straighten out afterwards. So, in a sense, they're broken. Lines 17-20 The speaker paints us a vivid picture of what these "broken" trees look like when the snow thaws and their leaves come back. The speaker says that the trees look like girls drying their hair in the sun. Those of us with short hair may not realize that long hair takes forever to dry. Now imagine drying hair in the days before hairdryers. These country girls that the speaker describes are on their hands and knees, bending their heads down so that the sun can dry their hair. Lines 21-22 We see that the speaker got a little distracted by talking about the image of girls drying their hair, but now he's back. We're not sure what he has come back to. This might just be a poet's way of telling his audience that he's shifting gears to a new topic. Also, whenever the idea of "Truth" enters into a poem, you should be suspicious. Here "Truth" is associated with "matter-of-fact" in the sense of real-life observations about nature or amateur science. That "Truth" becomes a part of the discussion should clue you in that the speaker might be testing the poetic waters for different ideas about facts, values, science, nature, and spirituality (a.k.a. metaphysics).

Lines 23-27 First, we got the country girls, and now we've moved on to the boys. The speaker is wishfully imagining that a boy were bending the trees instead of the wind, ice, and snow. He comes up with some details about who our tree-bender might be. He imagines a boy who herds cows, doesn't know how to play baseball, and doesn't have any friends. boy lives on an isolated, New England farm and has to work. He has to entertain The himself year round and so he explores his natural world. Maybe he's training to become the next Robert Frost. Lines 28-32 The speaker imagines the boy going out into his father's land. The boy "rides" the birch trees down, meaning that the boy climbs to the top of them until his weight bends the trees down to the ground. Remember this is what the speaker wishes was bending the trees instead of the snow and ice. The boy does this so many times on his father's land that the trees lose their stiffness and bend towards the ground. One way to interpret line 32 is to see it as an example of man conquering nature. Can you find another way to interpret it? Lines 32-35 The boy starts to get better about swinging the trees over time. He learns to get all the way to the top of the tree and not bend it too soon, before he's reached the top. If he did jump out too soon, the tree would be damaged. If you're a science person, think of this as a Physics lesson combined with a Biology lesson: the tree is a flexible lever; the roots are the fulcrum; the boy is the load. Lines 35-38 Now we're getting some details of how the boy becomes better at swinging the trees. He keeps "his poise," meaning he stays balanced and calm, sort of hovering up on a tree branch. The speaker compares it to filling a cup to the brim. If you are pouring liquid into a cup, you are so careful not to overflow the cup, so you add a small amount of the liquid at a time. Then you add just a teeny bit more and the liquid forms a dome just

above the rim of the cup. Think of this one as a Chemistry lesson. Are you beginning to notice that nature and science play important roles in this Frost poem? Lines 39-40 The boy has filled the metaphorical cup above the brim and has now reached the top of the tree. Next he kicks his feet out (presumably holding onto a branch) and uses the tree like a bungee chord. The tree bends just enough so that the boy is lowered to the ground without harm. Lines 41-42 Here we have another transition. The speaker shifts gears from a young boy he imagines swinging on a birch tree, to himself as an older man. He seems to reflect on how he isn't young anymore. Apparently the speaker can imagine this boy swinging trees in such great detail because he was once that little boy. He wishes he were out there swinging trees like he was a boy again. So all these details could be memories from his boyhood: conquering nature, girls sunning themselves, time alone to think about the natural world. Lines 43-47 The speaker wishes he could be a boy again when he's "dreary of considerations." "Considerations" could mean thoughtful decision making an important adult activity. That's probably not what he's weary of, however. Instead, "considerations" might refer to the give and take of life. Older people have to give up things or pay for things that kids don't. This might be a way for the speaker to lament the fact that his life is now filled with responsibilities. What else might "considerations" mean? Next the speaker compares life to "a pathless wood," meaning it's easy to get lost when there are no directions provided. Lines 45-47 give the details of what happens when you walk through a pathless wood. You get sharp branches and spider webs in your face. These are all metaphors for the slings and arrows of life. Lines 48-49 The speaker transitions to the idea that going back to his childhood is an escape. He wants to take a vacation from life.

Whether it's a vacation from adult life with responsibilities or a vacation from the world of the living, we don't know. The idea to take away is that he wants a new beginning. He still enjoys life's pleasures, and he doesn't want to die. But he doesn't want to be where he is now. Lines 50-53 The speaker seems to make the following disclaimer: "If any deity, higher power, etc. heard me wish for a break from life, please don't take away my life without ensuring the safe return after an agreed upon time." Just in case his dreary outlook on life is a phase, the speaker says to himself that he has no desire to make his vacation from life permanent. His reason is that he is a lover of life. Anyone who appreciates the sway of trees in the chilling wind loves life. For the speaker, love is a worldly idea. "It's" (meaning love) worldly to him, because the world is all he knows. He recognizes that the world you know is better than an imagined one. Lines 54-57 This appreciation of life doesn't mean he isn't curious. The speaker still wonders about the limits of life and tests out where life ends and heaven begins. Line 54 has a funny wording that needs to be pointed out: "I'd like to go by" Usually people talk like this about their own death: "I'd like to go in my sleep." So it seems like the speaker is saying that he'd like to go to heaven by climbing a tree. However in line 56 he says "Towards heaven," so he doesn't actually want to get to heaven just yet. In other words, to quote reggae legend Peter Tosh, "Everybody want to go to heaven, / Nobody want to die." Instead the speaker wants a peek at heaven from the top of the tree, then gently return to his normal life. Lines 58-59 The speaker is pleased with this resolution. He likes the idea of a vacation from the troubles of life, as long as it is only vacation and not a permanent situation. The glimpse at the world from a new perspective would be rejuvenating. He concludes, like he did in lines 52 and 53, that life's pleasures (like birch swinging) are enough to make life worth living.

Symbol Analysis Many poets, Frost included, like to play with the differences between appearances and observable facts. At some point in you're life you've probably misunderstood something someone said and messed up because of it, right? Also, you've probably had a dream that seems so real that you wake up and have to figure out if it really happened or not. Poets like to be sneaky with what we assume to be facts they often imagine how things could be different. Line 9: The speaker calls the ice coating the trees enamel. Usually enamel refers to the glossy and glassy coating around pottery. Pottery is considered art, but are trees art? The poet has painted a pretty picture of the trees, but now the image "cracks and crazes." The scientific reality of the sun and wind has broken up the artwork. Lines 10 and 11: The speaker compares the ice to crystal shells and enhances the image with descriptive language. The imagery of "[s]hattering and avalanching" ice is a vivid sight to imagine. Line 12: This metaphor of cracking ice as shattering crystal is conceptually tied together with broken glass, because the two images are so similar. The need to sweep the heaps of glass away turns the metaphor into an extended metaphor by adding on new metaphors to the original. Line 13: The extended metaphor reaches its conclusion with the shattering of the crystal dome that was once said to separate earth from heaven. Line 15: The extended metaphor is paralleled with how the birches "seem not to break." Notice how appearances are getting tied up with imaginative language and metaphors. Lines 19-20: The broken trees are compared to girls drying their hair in the sun. This simile shows how the imagination can carry the speaker and reader away. Line 21: "Truth" breaks into the poem, but the speaker is probably being ironic. The truths we've come across aren't so matter of fact. Instead they are imaginative ideas inspired by the "facts" of nature. Line 44: This simile compares life to an overgrown forest. It's hard to tell what direction you're going when you can't find a path and end up getting poked in the eye by a twig.

The boy in the poem is imaginary. Unlike the ice-storm that leaves its traces, the speaker only imagines the boy. The speaker imagines the boy as a younger version of himself. We learn that the boy represents the specific time in the speaker's life that was filled with simple pleasures, adventures in nature, and idle hours. The boy is the Romantic version of the speaker's desire to commune with nature, reaching to the heavens but never getting there. Line 3: The speaker imagines a boy has bent some birches out of shape. Lines 23-27: The imaginary boy lives in a "pastoral" world, meaning that he is closely tied with animals and spends most of his time happily playing in nature. Lines 28-32: The boy is also a metaphor for the rugged, American individual. He has struck out into the land that is his by birthright and conquered anything there was to conquer. This individual often stands as a metonymy for America's Manifest Destiny towards the continent (and world). Lines 33-40: The boy learns moderation and sensitivity towards his natural environment. His mastery of nature does not create a large "footprint." Blank Verse (Mostly Unrhymed, Iambic Pentameter) Frost writes this poem in blank verse, meaning that it doesn't rhyme (sad), but that it does have interesting structure stuff going on. The poem loosely follows an iambic pentameter structure. But what the heck does that mean as well? "Iambic" refers to the pattern of stresses in the line. An "iamb" is an unstressed syllable, followed by a stressed syllable: da-DUM. "Pentameter" means that there are five ("penta") iambs in the line: da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM. Easy, right?Although, Frost wrote some formal and conservative verse, he's not known for that kind of poetry. Rather, Frost earned critical and popular attention for his verse written in blank and free verse. He liked to imitate the sound of regular or rural speech. English has a tendency to fall into the rhythm of iambs, but occasionally throws in an anapest (which is two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable, da-da-DUM) at the beginning of a sentence or a dactyl (which is a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed, DUM-da-da). Frost's verse, like English, is irregular but works off of common patterns. Speaker We get the sense that the speaker is an older man who is experienced and wistful. He grew up before 1900, and the world at large is changing. However, he's managed to live in a pocket of the United States that isn't much different from the way it was a hundred years ago. For example, baseball became popular during the Civil War and

the boy our speaker imagines doesn't know how to play the sport. The full-grown man is probably a farmer. We imagine that his nights are restless, because he's trying to figure out those "considerations." What can he put off a little longer? What has to get done tomorrow? These are the thoughts that fill his head, and he wishes for the days of carefree boyhood. Birches Setting Where It All Goes Down The setting of "Birches" is not explicitly given, so we have license, as readers, to use our imagination. Here's one way that we envision the setting, but feel free to come up with your own. It's a cold New England morning and the snow is almost up to your knee. We might be in Amherst, Massachusetts (where Frost lived), but then again, we might be in another snowy, cold location. A recent ice-storm has left the forest glazed in ice, and the branches of the trees bend under the weight of the ice. The sun has melted the top layer of the snow to the point where it holds your weight for only a second before breaking. Most of the forest animals have either migrated or are hibernating, so you don't see any, and only hear the sounds of the icy tree branches clicking in the wind. If you've never experienced an ice storm, you might want to check out this picture to see the kind of setting Frost was probably picturing. Old Man and Young Boy A lot of readers tend to associate Frost with older age. Most photos that you'll see of Robert Frost were taken when he was an older man. Frost has a large number of poems about old men and only a handful of younger men. This interest in age may have something to do with the fact that Frost lived in an area that still had its footing in the old world. Old age doesn't really mean anything, however, unless it can be contrasted to youth. The young represent such important things to poets: innocence, other-worldliness, and endless opportunity.