Over on General Talk we had a lively discussion of fact versus fiction in poetry, and it put me in mind of Frost's "Birches," which I have always read as, among other things, a meditation on that question. In fact, a little-known deleted line from the poem suggests that Frost meant the "sway" of the trees he describes to be taken as a supple movement between truth and fiction, a metaphor for the embellishing imagination, as well as for the movement between the earthy and the spiritual -- to name but two possibilities.
"When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of staighter, 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..."
"I like to think" comes and goes so quickly it's easy to miss, but it sets us up for the division of fact and fancy that is to follow. He goes on at some length about what really bends the trees, and he gets very poemy about it, too, with some wonderful images.
At line 22 we get a turn back to what he would like, as opposed to what IS:
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter of fact about the ice storm...
The narrator tells us he's unabashedly veering (or perhaps climbing) away from Truth and "matter of fact." After the line "With all her matter of fact," Frost originally included, in parentheses, "Now am I free to be poetical?" The line was deleted after the first publication in (I believe) the Atlantic and the first edition of "Mountain Interval." As far as I know, Frost never explained the decision to drop it, and it doesn't seem such a big loss. However, it pretty much tips his hand: Being poetical means, at least sometimes, turning deliberately away from the Truth -- but perhaps not abandoning it altogether.
The poem is about climbing up, away from solid ground, toward something airy and insubstantial but attractive and perhaps (paradoxically) more lasting than earth and even earthly love. It's the rush of the controlled fall from heaven to earth that excites the boy in the poem, or that excites the poet as he remembers being such a boy. It's also the ascent and descent from and to literal truth and higher truth. Yes, he tells us, I know how the trees really got doubled over that way, but look what I can discover about my own past and my own temperament by giving my imagination free play for a while.
Read this way, the conclusion, "One could do worse than be a swinger or birches," suggests that going too far either way is "worse." Playing back and forth between the two is the best way, as long perhaps as one keeps track of where one is and climbs the "black branches up a snow white trunk" very carefully, always keeping "his poise."
RPW
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