Complete Text
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay
As ice storms do. Often you must have seen them 5
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells 10
Shattering and avalanching on the snow crust--
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed 15
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, 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. 20
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter of fact about the ice storm,
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows--
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball, 25
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
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, 30
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
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise 35
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground. 40
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs 45
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig's having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May not fate willfully misunderstand me 50
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk 55
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
Commentary
The title is "Birches," but the subject is birch "swinging." And the theme of
poem seems to be, more generally and more deeply, this motion of swinging. The
force behind it comes from contrary pulls--truth and imagination, earth and
heaven, concrete and spirit, control and abandon, flight and return. We have
the earth below, we have the world of the treetops and above, and we have the
motion between these two poles.
The whole upward thrust of the poem is toward imagination, escape, and
transcendence--and away from heavy Truth with a capital T. The downward pull is
back to earth. Likely everyone understands the desire "to get away from the
earth awhile." The attraction of climbing trees is likewise universal. Who
would not like to climb above the fray, to leave below the difficulties or
drudgery of the everyday, particularly when one is "weary of considerations, /
And life is too much like a pathless wood." One way to navigate a pathless wood
is to climb a tree. But this act of climbing is not necessarily so
pragmatically motivated: For the boy, it is a form of play; for the man, it is a
transcendent escape. In either case, climbing birches seems synonymous with
imagination and the imaginative act, a push toward the ethereal, and even the
contemplation of death.
But the speaker does not leave it at that. He does not want his wish half-
fulfilled--does not want to be left, so to speak, out on a limb. If climbing
trees is a sort of push toward transcendence, then complete transcendence means
never to come back down. But this speaker is not someone who puts much stock in
the promise of an afterlife. He rejects the self-delusional extreme of
imagination, and he reinforces his ties to the earth. He says, "Earth's the right
place for love," however imperfect, though his "face burns" and "one eye is
weeping." He must escape to keep his sanity; yet he must return to keep going.
He wants to push "[t]oward heaven" to the limits of earthly possibility,
but to go too far is to be lost. The upward motion requires a complement, a
swing in the other direction to maintain a livable balance.
And that is why the birch tree is the perfect vehicle. As a tree, it is rooted
in the ground; in climbing it, one has not completely severed ties to the earth.
Moreover, as the final leap back down takes skill, experience, and courage, it
is not a mere retreat but a new trajectory. Thus, one's path up and down the
birch is one that is "good both going and coming back." The "Truth" of the ice
storm does not interfere for long; for the poet looks at bent trees and imagines
another truth: nothing less than a recipe for how to live well.
A poem as richly textured as "Birches" yields no shortage of interpretations.
The poem is whole and lovely at the literal level, but it invites the reader to
look below the surface and build his or her own understanding. The important
thing for the interpreter is to attune her reading to the elements of the poem
that may suggest other meanings. One such crucial element is the aforementioned
swinging motion between opposites. Notice the contrast between Truth
and what the speaker prefers to imagine happened to the birch trees. But also
note that Truth, as the speaker relates it, is highly figurative and
imaginative: Ice storms are described in terms of the "inner dome of heaven,"
and bent trees as girls drying their hair in the sun. This sort of truth calls
into question whether the speaker believes there is, in fact, a capital-T Truth.
The language of the poem--the vocabulary and rhythms--is very conversational
and, in parts, gently humorous: "But I was going to say when Truth broke in / With
all her matter of fact about the ice storm." But the folksiness does not come
at the cost of accuracy or power; the description of the post-ice storm birch
trees is vivid and evocative. Nor is this poem isolated, with its demotic
vocabulary, from the pillars of poetic tradition. The "pathless wood" in line
44 enters into a dialogue with the whole body of Frost's work--a dialogue that
goes back to the opening lines of Dante's Inferno. And compare
line
13 with these well-known lines from Shelley's elegy for Keats,
"Adonais": "Life, like a dome of many colour'd glass, / Stains the white
radiance of Eternity, / Until death tramples it to fragments." In "Birches,"
the pieces of heaven shattered and sprinkled on the ground present another
comparison between the imaginative and the concrete, a description of Truth that
undermines itself by invoking an overthrown, now poetic scheme of celestial
construction (heavenly spheres). Shelley's stanza continues: "Die, / If thou
wouldst be with that which thou dost seek." Frost's speaker wants to climb
toward heaven but then dip back down to earth--not to reach what he
seeks but to seek and then swing back into the orbit of the world.
Frost also imbues the poem with distinct sexual imagery. The idea of
tree-climbing, on its own, has sexual overtones. The following lines are more
overt:
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.
As are these more sensual:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, 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.
The whole process of birch swinging iterates that of sex, and at least one
critic has noted that "Birches" is a poem about erotic fantasy, about a lonely,
isolated boy who yearns to conquer these trees sexually. It is a testament to
the richness of the poem that it fully supports readings as divergent as those
mentioned here--and many more.
Two more items to consider: First, reread the poem and think about the possible
connections between getting "away from the earth for awhile" (line 48) and
death. Consider the viewpoint of the speaker and where he seems to be at in his
life. Secondly, when the speaker proclaims, in line 52, "Earth's the right
place for love," this is the first mention of love in the poem. Of what kind of
love does he speak? There are many kinds of love, just as there are many
potential objects of love. Try relating this love to the rest of the
poem.
