Monday, March 18, 2013

Birches Week #2

i believe in this poem "Birches" by Robert Frost, that the speaker is speaking in the first person to an imaginary audience. Birches are trees with slender trunks and bark that peels off like paper. They can grow up to 50 feet tall. birches have thin trunks, they bend pretty easily in the wind and under the weight of snow.
Also, some types of birches have white bark, so they stand out against "straighter darker trees."
When the speaker sees the birch trees bent to the ground, he imagines that a young boy was "swinging them." We can imagine that a birch would be bent a little after the swinging.
Lines 4-7
"But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay
As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain"
From these lines we learn that swinging bends the tree down to the ground. But, swinging doesn't bend the tree enough to cause permanent damage like an ice-storm can.
this poem gives substantial details about the birches and the boy and facing his trial and tribulations in his life as an adult. he has strong imagery about being a little boy and bringing back memories of his boyhood, and experience playing on the birches, and now has been the same place he wants to us to escape his troubles in adult life. he feels at peace on the birches, and you can sense that here from lines
"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."
 In “Birches,” the pieces of heaven shattered and sprinkled on the ground present another comparison between the imaginative and the concrete, a description of Truth that undermines itself by invoking an overthrown, now poetic scheme of celestial construction (heavenly spheres).

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