Analysis of Birches Essay -- Robert Frost Birches Essays

Analysis of Birches The discursive blank-verse meditation Birches does not center on a continuously encountered and revealing constitution scene rather, it builds a mosaic of thoughts from fragments of memory and fantasy. Its vividness and genial, bittersweet speculation help make it one of Frosts most popular poems, and because its shifts of metaphor and tone draw varying interpretation it has also received much critical discussion, not always admiring. The poem moves back and forth between two visual perspectives birch tree trees as bent by boys playful swinging and by ice storms, the thematic interweaving being somewhat puzzling. The birches bent across the lines of straighter darker trees subtly introduce the floor of imagination and will opposing darker realities. Then, almost a third of the poem describes how ice storms bend these trees permanently, unlike the action of boys this scene combines images of beauty and of distortion. Ice shells kick up radiating light and colo r, and the trees bowed to the level of the bracken, suggest suffering, which is immediately lighte...