AS English Literature Unit One: Poetry; ‘The Rattle Bag’; Land
‘Birches’ by Robert Frost
1 What does the boy imagine has happened to the trees? What has, in fact, happened?
2 One critic, Paul Giles, remarks that in ‘Birches’ ‘we encounter something more like a weird dream landscape, where meanings are projected anthropomorphically on inert matter.’ Put this comment into your own words. Do you agree?
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
As ice storms do.’
What is the speaker’s attitude to the sight of the bent birches bending ‘left and right/ Across the line of straighter darker trees’?
3 What lines suggest that the speaker’s imagination is ignited by the trees?
4 Most critics comment that there are points of erotic violence/sexual imagery in this view of the birches. Where do these occur, and how do they link to the central ideas of the poem?
5 What is the function of the following lines, keeping in mind what immediately precedes them?
"But I was going to say when Truth broke in / With all her matter of fact about the ice storm."
6 What is the significance of the swinging that the boy indulges in? What does it mean to him later as an adult?
It's when I'm weary of considerations,And life is too much like a pathless wood / 45
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. / 50
7 According to Paul Giles, ‘Birches’
‘is concerned to mediate between opposing, antagonistic forces rather than to transcend or reconcile them.’
Find some quotations or details that could support this view of the poem.
8 In an interview, Robert Frost commented on his poem:
And again, in "Birches" as I look back to it, I see one line that had to do with those days back there when everybody was wondering about America, and doubting America, and talking about how America had failed to educate them, and how America had failed to do this and that. The one line in the poem that you'll catch as I go through it is the one, "When I'm weary of considerations" [slight laugh].
You see, the theme runs all through it, and the theme is really separateness. And about confusion of parts, you know, the necessity for deconfusing by making the parts more distinct--nations, individuals--the difference between [them]. The confusion that people make about freedom and equality needs to be thought out, cleared up by thought. The two things govern each other, control each other. One party of our parties leans a tiny little bit more toward the liberty. One leans a tiny little bit more to equality. And what keeps us together in our difference is the word fraternity, the third word of the revolutionaries. I am sometimes thought of as too individualist. And that I'm willing to be, I lean a little toward the freedom, the right to go ahead and be myself. I've always found myself in situations where I could be accused sometimes of being selfish.
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Publication Information: Article Title: Robert Frost on 'Listen America': The Poet's Message to America in 1956. Contributors: Michael E. Cornett - author. Journal Title: Papers on Language & Literature. Volume: 29. Issue: 4. Publication Year: 1993. Page Number: 417+. COPYRIGHT 1993 Southern Illinois University; COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group
How do these comments affect your reading of the poem?
9 What does Frost mean when he asserts that ‘Earth’s the right place for love’? What idea is he rejecting at this point?
10 What indication is there that earthly relationships are often painful?
11 Comment on the structure, rhyme and metre of the poem.
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