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Birches | Introduction

"Birches" is one of Robert Frost's most popular and beloved poems. Yet, like so much of his work, there is far more happening within the poem than first appears.

"Birches" was first published in the Atlantic Monthly in August of 1915; it was first collected in Frost's third book, Mountain Interval, in 1916. "Birches," with its formal perfection, its opposition of the internal and external worlds, and its sometimes dry wit, is one of the best examples of everything that was good and strong in Frost's poetry.

The main image of the poem is of a series of birch trees that have been bowed down so that they no longer stand up straight but rather are arched over. While the poet quickly establishes that he knows the real reason that this has happened—ice storms have weighed down the branches of the birch trees, causing them to bend over—he prefers instead to imagine that something else entirely has happened: a young boy has climbed to the top of the trees and pulled them down, riding the trees as they droop down and then spring back up over and over again until they become arched over. This tension between what has actually happened and what the poet would like to have happened, between the real world and the world of the imagination, runs throughout Frost's poetry and gives the poem philosophical dimension and meaning far greater than that of a simple meditation on birch trees.

Birches Summary

"Birches" is a poem of fifty-nine lines without any stanza breaks. However, the poem does contain several sections that move from naturalistic description to a fanciful explanation of why the birches are bowed, and it concludes with philosophical exploration of a person's existence in the world.

Lines 1-4
Frost opens the poem with an image of the birches bent "left and right / across the lines of straighter darker trees" (lines 1-2) and quickly puts forth one explanation for how they got that way: a boy had been swinging on them. Right away, however, he admits this is false, saying in line 4, "But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay." However, the image of the playful boy is a powerful one for Frost, and he will soon return to it.

Lines 5-11
The first break in the poem occurs in line 5 when Frost admits that it is ice storms, not boys, who bend down the birch trees. The next few lines are a beautiful description of birch trees, their branches frozen and encrusted with ice in the morning after an ice storm. However, their beauty is only short-lived; soon, in line 9, the sun "cracks and crazes their enamel"—the ice, which breaks and falls into the snow. This is the first hint of destruction in the poem (other than the birches themselves).

Lines 12-20
Frost makes another break in line 13 when he raises the symbolic level of the poem with the sentence: "You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen." This line not only anticipates the last lines of the poem, but it also signals the beginning of a retreat from reality. The language of the poem becomes more "poetical"; for the first time, Frost uses a simile, comparing the bowed birch trees to girls on all fours, their hair hanging down in front of them. More than just destruction, the imagery now turns to symbols of conquest: the birches are bowed so that they can never right themselves; the image of the girl is also the image of a captive kneeling before her captor. This becomes an important theme in later parts of the poem.

Lines 21-27
The second really significant break (the first was in line 5) occurs now. Frost dismisses the ice storm as a cause of the birches' condition in favor of his original explanation that a boy had bent them—despite the fact that he knows that a boy didn't do it:

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