Birches

Birches,
blank-verse lyric by Robert Frost, published in Mountain Interval (1916). The poet describes his boyhood pleasure in climbing birch trees, swinging from the tops until the supple trunks bent in a curve to the ground. He dreams of being again “a swinger of birches,” and finds in this occupation a symbol for his desired surcease from “considerations,” in which he might
go by climbing a birch tree …
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.