Reminiscence of “Birches” Robert Frost’s “Birches” is a poem that makes incites towards the shortness of one’s life. In the poem, Frost reminisces on his childhood, and remembers it all too well. The poem is meant to help the reader to reflect on his/her own life and leave them wanting to treasure moments of the present more intensely. The poem encourages its readers to think about what great things lay ahead, while looking at the positive side of life. Although Frost knew the tree branches were bent because of the ice storms, he liked to look at things in a more analytical way. Throughout the poem, Frost imagines that a young boy would play on the birch trees and climb “Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more” (Line 56). Frost intends for his readers to look at things in a brighter perspective. It is obvious that the author has gotten old, and feels as if time went by too fast. Frost highlights the fact that the character longs to return to the time when he was a young boy, swinging on trees. Robert Frost uses “Birches” to express melancholy towards growing old and accepting death. The life of Robert Frost brought many disappointments and eventually accomplishments. Mr. Frost's life began on March 26, 1874 in San Francisco, California. During his childhood, he experienced the sadness and abuse of an alcoholic father. When he was only eleven years old, his father died at the young age of 34. As a young boy Frost played baseball, trapped animals and climbed
Robert Frost (1874-1973) was born in California and, when he was eleven, his dad died. After that, the family moved to the area of New England where he wrote most of his poetry. He is a well-known American voice and his work was well appreciated. He won the Pulitzer prize for poetry four times and, in 1960, he won the Congressional Gold Medal. In addition to being decorated as a poet, his poems are beloved for their simple but universal ideas which appeal to many. Three of these universal ideas include decision-making, imagination, and the beauty of the woods.
Frost uses several techniques in his poem, but perhaps the most significant is his use of the metaphor. First, he describes “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood” (1). The roads represent the different choices that people have to make in life and how there isn’t always one choice to be made. Each path is an important decision which he must make, so he has to choose carefully when examining each path. When he “looked down one as far as (he) could to where it bent in the undergrowth” (4-5), this represents him not being able to predict and see the future. The forest represents the unknown, and he cannot see or predict his unknown future. One may think that his choice
Robert was born in San Francisco, California on March 26th, 1874. His parents, William Prescott Frost and Isabelle Moodie were both teachers (“Robert” 1). William and Isabelle met while they were both teaching in Pennsylvania and fell in love. In 1884 William Frost died, leaving his wife and son on their own. The family struggles financially since they were only receiving one check instead of two (Encyclopedia 1). Throughout elementary and middle school, Robert surprisingly didn’t like going to school. He would have rather been playing football or baseball with his friends. His mother made him realize the importance of an education just in time for high school (American 1).
Robert Frost was born March 26, 1874 at San Francisco, California and died January 29, 1963 at Boston, Massachusetts. Frost was an educator and poet. He is widely known for his poetry; some of Frost’s famous work includes The Road Not Taken, Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening, Mending Wall, and Out, Out─. Out, Out─ tells a story of a young boy cutting wood to help provide for his family. He then acquires an injury on his hand by the saw. The boy ends up dying due to the severity of his wound. His family returns to their duties. This poem uses many elements to emphasize death. Robert Frost uses the poetic elements of imagery, figures of speech, and symbolism to illustrate the theme of death in the poem Out, Out─.
In “Birches”, the speaker thinks of childhood as a time of innocence, where everything is easy going and immaturity is acceptable. Instead of believing that the birches are being bent by ice storms, he likes to picture that they are like that due to an adventurous, carefree child. He specifically says, “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,/ Whose only play was what he found himself,/ Summer or Winter, and he could play alone”. Essentially, instead of believing in a
Frost also uses the trees in this poem to represent a way to get away from the cares and trials of life on Earth. He talks of getting away and coming back to start over as if climbing “towards heaven”. He desires to be free from it all, but then he says that he is afraid that the fates might misunderstand and take him away to never return. This is like most of us today. We want to go to Heaven, but we don’t want to die to get there.
Robert Frost was born on March 26, 1874 in San Francisco, CA to parents William Prescott Frost Jr and Isabelle Moodie Frost. At the age of 11 his father, who was a journalist, passed away due to tuberculosis. After this, he moved with his mother and sister across the country to Lawrence, Massachusetts
In a poem known as Birches, Frost portrays an older man dreaming for a better life. He starts off with having this older man make his connection between realism and fantasy, setting the overall mood for this poem. The connection he makes is that he sees these trees have limbs that are bowed over and how that makes him think that a young boy has been swinging from those limbs. Although, he knows in reality that swinging will not cause that type of bend in a tree, but yet ice-storms do because of the build up from snow and ice on each limb. Frost then goes into detail about the surrounding area to create an image in the reader’s head, to set a scene, and to show how appreciative he is for the beauty of his surroundings. After the scene is set, he goes back into realism stating the real reason for the bending of the trees, which can have the reader make an insinuation that even with all the hardships faced in life, they have yet to give up, that they are still standing strong. Frost then has the old man shift back into fantasy where the old man states that he’d rather the trees have been bent from a little boys swinging amongst them. For he once was a swinger of trees and when the hardships of life become too much for he that he wishes to return to such. Frost also incorporate the use of religion in this particular poem, by having the old man state that he want to get away from earth for a while and then return to begin all over.
In the first fifteen lines Frost uses the metaphor of a boy swinging the limbs of the birch tree for what nature really does. The poet describes the tree limbs in the winter with imagery “Loaded with ice," that cracks and "crazes their enamel.” The word enamel is also metaphor, comparing the bark to enamel. Also, the snow is metaphorically compared to broken glass that is swept away.
Birch is grown in North America and Europe and Asia and is also known as the Lady of the woods the birch is used for things such as anti-inflammatory, astringent, laxative, and diuretic, anti-rheumatic, stimulant, choloagogue and diaphragmatic qualities. It helps with urinary tract infections, it helps get rid of kidney stones, it helps to get rid of water in your body, pain, it helps with insomnia as well as cancer sores and expel worms this is just a few of the things birch can do. Birch is a great purifier and make the earth clean where no other want to be. In the Celtic myth birch tree is known as the renewal and purification tree. you use birch trees to drive out spirits. the birch tree is used for purifying and cleansing of gardens floors
On the surface, the poem "Birches" by Robert Frost is simply about a man who would like to believe that birch trees are bent from young boys swinging on them, despite the evidence that it is merely a result of the ice-storms. Even with this knowledge he prefers the idea of the boys swinging from the trees because he was a birch swinger years ago and continuously dreams of returning and experiencing those pleasant memories once again. From a more explored and analytical point of view, the birch trees symbolize life and serves as the speaker 's temporary channel of escape from the world and its harsh realities. The speaker uses his imagination to return to his innocent childhood. He hopes to relieve stress and prepare to face life and
Frost’s use of alliteration, personification, and imagery definitely conveyed the speaker’s attitude towards the woods. The reader believes Frost wrote about the woods to show how peaceful and calming it is in an isolated place such as the woods. Most people live in crowded neighborhoods or over-populated places, but living in a secluded area decreases the stress of others outside their household. Because of how isolated the woods are, they can worry about themselves compared to worrying and stressing on the outside
“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words,” Robert Frost once said. As is made fairly obvious by this quote, Frost was an adroit thinker. It seems like he spent much of his life thinking about the little things. He often pondered the meaning and symbolism of things he found in nature. Many readers find Robert Frost’s poems to be straightforward, yet his work contains deeper layers of complexity beneath the surface. These deeper layers of complexity can be clearly seen in his poems “ The Road Not Taken”, “Fire and Ice”, and “Birches”.
In order to understand where Robert Frost is coming from in his poetry it is important to learn about the experiences in his life. Robert Frost was born on March 26, 1874 in San Francisco. His father was from
The discursive blank-verse meditation "Birches" does not center on a continuously encountered and revealing nature 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 Frost's most popular poems, and because its shifts of metaphor and tone invite varying interpretation it has also received much critical discussion, not always admiring. The poem moves back and forth between two visual perspectives: birch 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 theme of