[momdebomb]

One of my favorites:


BIRCHES
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-coloured
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground,
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm,
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 could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father's trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig's having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
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.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.



[This message has been edited by momdebomb (edited February 27, 2001).]

[Richard Wakefield]

When this poem had its first publication, in the Atlantic Monthly, in 1915, it included a line -- complete with parentheses, that Frost later deleted:

But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter of fact about the ice storm,
(Now am I free to be poetical?)

I think he was right to omit the parenthetical line, but it does suggest that he meant for the poem itself to play between fact and fancy much as the boy plays between the unyielding stiffness of the tree trunk lower down and its pliable upper regions. I think of this often when I'm writing about real events (as Frost was here, he claimed) and deciding what liberties I can take for the sake of poetry, or even for the sake of some higher truth.
Richard

[momdebomb]

That's the whole thing about Frost (to me anyway). The truth always breaks in. It breaks in and gets you when you're least expecting it because he has you distracted for a moment. You're happily reading along about swinging in trees and he hits you with:

"One by one he subdued his father's trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer."

And we're all faced with the truth about our own relationships with our fathers.

Sharon Passmore

[robert mezey]

"Birches" is beautiful---some matchless things in
it. There's also a touch of the avuncular wise
old sage that sometimes gets a little wearing in
RF. But hell, most of us would give our right arm
(well, maybe left arm) to have written it.
I'm sure you all know this one, but I'll enjoy
copying it out. I think it is one of the deepest
lyrics of the century in English, and it's just
about inexhaustible.

THE MOST OF IT

He thought he kept the universe alone;
For all the voice in answer he could wake
Was but the mocking echo of his own
From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.
Some morning from the boulder-broken beach
He would cry out on life, that what it wants
Is not its own love back in copy speech,
But counter-love, original response.
And nothing ever came of what he cried
Unless it was the embodiment that crashed
In the cliff's talus on the other side,
And then in the far distant water splashed,
But after a time allowed for it to swim,
Instead of proving human when it neared
And someone else additional to him,
As a great buck it powerfully appeared,
Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,
And landed pouring like a waterfall,
And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,
And forced the underbrush---and that was all.

[Richard Wakefield]

Robert, you're right that this poem bear almost endless scrutiny and yields endless pleasures. One part that never ceases to wow me is the way Frost makes his lines enact the slow realization of the buck: in line 10 it's "it" and "the embodiment," then in 13 and 14 "it" and "it" again, and we hear about what it isn't before the perfectly natural (but maybe not trivial) solution appears.
Richard

[Len Krisak]

Dear Robert and Richard,

Not only is this poem perhaps greatly
underrated, but only now is the critical
establishment getting to it. Three years
ago, I heard Bonnie Costello(e?), from Boston U.,
give a little talk on this piece at the Frost
Festival in Lawrence, Mass. She spoke for only 20
minutes, but I was stunned by the subtlety of
her close reading--and of course, ultimately
by Frost's subtlety.

Also, a sad, if not quite tragic, poem.
Counter-speech, indeed.

[Alan Sullivan]

"The Most of It" is a knockout, and more to my taste than the looser "Birches," in which the folksy voice is laid on a bit too thick for me. But thanks to Sharon for posting it. I always enjoy typing in a poem of moderate length, a task that brings one close to the words, closer even than speech. "Birches" runs more than four sonnets' length, a big job without a scanner.

Alan Sullivan

[robert mezey]

The pronoun "it" seems to refer to the
embodiment, but when you look closer, you
see it refers to the subject of the sentence,
nothing. Or what came of what he cried. It
is so uncertain, so conditional, as usual
with the Master. And it is sad, yes, but
not only sad. "and that was all" sounds
like a conclusive end and disappointment,
but it also means the opposite: that fierce
beautiful buck is the All, or a representative
of it, maybe all we get of a response, or of
counter-love---but it's a lot (as well as
nothing)---it's like God appearing out of the
whirlwind in Job and giving Job a response
that at first seems to have nothing whatever
to do with what he asked. And of course there
are other important echoes---Genesis
(2nd chapter), Robinson Crusoe, Walden
, the Boy of Winander story in The Prelude
etc. One could go on and on.

[Richard Wakefield]

Robert, yes, the "it" strictly goes back to "nothing," but in between we get that "unless" and then comes the utterly abstract "embodiment" (even though a literal embodiment is the opposite of an abstraction, right?). The "unless" is another of those words Frost uses to throw us headlong into the infinities, much like the "all" at the end, which as you point out can mean everything or nothing. We could indeed go on and on. I've come back to that poem among others of Frost's countless times and found that wherever I am in life, Frost was there first.
Richard