Post by jayvee on Jul 5, 2006 15:27:32 GMT -5
I wrote this about two years ago for a LIT class at college (and it's held up better over time than I thought it would). Just something different to read, since people seem to be talking about classic poetry in here. But first, the original poems:
"Birches" by Robert Frost
WHEN I see birches bend to left and right
Across the line 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 5
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells 10
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 15
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. 20
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 should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows— 25
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 30
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 35
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, 40
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 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
May no fate wilfully 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, 55
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. 60
"The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost
TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Frost
And now, my essay:
In order to fully understand the message of both The Road Not Taken and Birches, I think it is also important to understand Robert Frost as a person and where he was in life when the two works were published. As such, this entire essay operates under four principles, things to keep in mind while reading: That Robert Frost was an intelligent man who was also well aware of his gift; that he had ego and recognition issues stemming from an alcoholic and often neglectful father; that the combination of the previous two resulted in severe depression, knowing that he could be great but not being able to do anything about it in terms of publication; as well as what Frost must have been feeling when The Road Not Taken and Birches finally found themselves in print on U.S. soil, in a collection of thirty-three poems titled Mountain Interval (New York, 1915). After nearly a decade of struggling for appreciation in America, Frost was able to find an audience receptive to his genius overseas in England, where A Boy’s Will (London, 1913) and North of Boston (London, 1914) were pressed with publishers David Nutt and David Null, respectively. It was due to this foreign interest that Frost was able to return home to the United States and pursue his literary career where it all began, and I think both The Road Not Taken and Birches are a testament to how much an ego that had previously been malnourished can rapidly inflate with so much sudden attention. While neither poem is commonly viewed in such a narcissistic light, I do believe that Frost’s abrupt success took a somewhat arrogant atmosphere in Mountain Interval, with these two selections in particular being the most cleverly disguised bits of conceit—though, after pouring over dozens of interpretations in order to find an according opinion, I have yet to unearth a single person in the universe who seems to agree with me.
In my mind, The Road Not Taken is Frost’s vulgar hand gesture to his peers at the time, those who had scoffed at his fondness and predilection for old style and convention, while Birches itself seems to be the conquering general’s whimsical desire for more of a fight, more enemies to replace the ones who are left cowering at his feet. I see that as their primary difference, two adventurous and outwardly ridiculous observations that—surprisingly—gain more and more credibility as we delve further into the actual poetry. (In truth, I almost dismissed the idea entirely, that Frost was gloating over his success, but as time went on and I looked closer at the source material, there was no denying the hunch. Robby absolutely had to brag.)
Let’s look at The Road Not Taken first, then, since it seems to be the more heavily quoted of the pair. Right off the bat, we start seeing Frost develop the punch line. Two roads he shows us in lines one through twelve, one that is worn and good and you can follow it with your eyes until it disappears around the bend and the other a grassy path, less traveled and wanting “wear.” Frost—and I think both Frost and the narrator are one and the same here and in Birches, too—finally tells us in the closing two lines that taking the second road has “made all the difference,” and this is obviously an allusion to his recent critical triumph. If the first, most traveled road is emblematic of that era’s creative trend—blank verse—and the latter is Frost’s defiance in the face of sensation, his stubborn refusal to pander to the crowd and alter how he believed poetry should be written, then it becomes easy to connect the dots between what seems to be helpful advice and the spiteful, malicious intent that truly hides behind Robby’s innocent exterior. “It has made all the difference,” he says. In other words, “Look at me! Look how I’ve finally broken through all your insults and became successful by being unique! It has made all the difference, the difference from being one of you herd creatures and my own distinct individual!” The tone is exceptionally condescending.
Birches, however, is a tad more complicated. It has more artsy, abstract elements involved and is nearly three times as long as its companion. In the face of higher hurdles, though, we can boil much of the poem down to three main elements that, once clarified, are a natural progression into the final twenty lines, the home stretch or the payoff.
First we have the trees themselves, things that I think are representative of Frost’s goals in life—not his life, but the things he wants to accomplish in it, an idea that holds true even when Frost introduces the grove because a person generally wants to realize a great many ambitions in their time on Earth, a great many goals. Reaching towards heaven from the top of the tree in line fifty-seven may be another clue Frost leaves us, to influence our thinking in this direction. Heaven is up; Heaven is higher. Goals are frequently thought of as things that we have to reach up towards, in Christianity the notion of Heaven being the premier target of one’s endeavors—the religious person’s ultimate goal. (Not knowing Frost’s own theological convictions, it is simple enough to wonder if the author, seeing himself as superior due to his accomplishments as some modern businessmen do, feels as though he’s earned his place beyond the Pearly Gates through sheer ability and not moral fiber as most men have to do. Dealing with egomania, which we may very well be doing if my theory holds, it’s hard to rule anything out as impossible. The recurrent mentioning of Heaven must hold some significance, anyway, for it to appear both in line thirteen and fifty-seven.)
Second are the boys, the swingers from the branches, who could logically be looked at as smaller steps toward conquering the objective, slowly pulling down all the branches until it’s defeated and the goal mastered. That’s why they have such positive connotation throughout, why they’re associated with baseball and summer—both fun things—because progress is most often linked with happiness. Gradually bowing the branches is something that everybody does, accounting for the fact that there are multiple boys instead of just one, and Frost obviously considers himself one of those boys, part of the throng of people who are pursuing their dreams… Which is how he can so easily switch gears in line forty one to single himself out, how he wishes he could still be a boy swinging from the branches, but now that he’s been published and is on top of the world that’s not entirely possible. The birch—and, indeed, the entire grove—has been conquered The race, knowing that he would win, is a challenge he wishes for again as most intelligent people yearn for challenges. Back to the introduction, the Blue General has seized the entire board and that particular game of RISK is over, never to be played again. He’s won and now he’s out of things to do. “How awesome am I to have done this?” he’s asking himself, patting himself on the back.
The third inciting element of Birches, and I think the most wrongly interpreted, is the ice storm. The storms here are characterized not as harbingers of death or negativity as the cold is in Fire & Ice, but as beautiful, powerful things that take the tree by force, bringing about the fulfillment of the goal as fast as swinging boys could never imagine. The ice storms are the books sold in England, the promotion from Private to Private First Class or the skip from bachelorhood to marriage if your goal is to have a family. They are the bigger steps that only come along every once in awhile, as evidenced by lines five through eleven, where Frost talks about how quickly the ice is made and then thawed in the sun—temporary and unexpected. These storms become beautiful through Frost’s word choice, being called at one point “crystal” and then again in the sensual way he recounts that moment in nature when an icicle drops and shatters on the snow. They are powerful because, “Look! Here are the boys and this is how much greater the storms affect the trees than the boys!” I think the power detailed here is another compass pointer to Mister Frost’s feeling of high self-worth, a tell-tale sign of how immense he thought he’d become. Power is an important concern for people who need to be recognized; it’s another form of attention.
It is from these three definitions that Frost declares himself at the finish line with the first place trophy, and I believe the author writes Birches this way so that he can present a full concept, the definitions followed by his opinions on them. Once Frost has gotten the clinical descriptions out of the way, he’s able to move into a deeper subject without losing any of his audience. That way it feels unabridged and whole, while I most certainly believe that The Road Not Taken was left intentionally short and sweet. The best revenge usually is, and it doesn’t take a whole lot of words to turn your nose up at somebody… You know? He used as many words as he needed to get the point across.
All those things being said—the unlike purposes of the poems, their alikeness in ego, and their disparity of length—the differences and similarities between The Road Not Taken and Birches take on entirely new meanings. The latter is Frost telling us what it’s like to be at the top, while the former is his report of the journey from the end of the road, but what invariably connects the two, makes them more akin than poles apart, is the evidence that, either way, he’s done what he’s set out to do. He’s famous and now both his intelligence and ego have been satiated to the point where he knows he’s smart and now everybody else knows it, too—like there’s nothing left to prove. This set talks about the same thing, and are an uncanny pictorial of what Frost might have been on the inside instead of the out, revealing Frost to be exactly what his work was: Human.
"Birches" by Robert Frost
WHEN I see birches bend to left and right
Across the line 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 5
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells 10
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 15
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. 20
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 should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows— 25
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 30
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 35
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, 40
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 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
May no fate wilfully 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, 55
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. 60
"The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost
TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Frost
And now, my essay:
In order to fully understand the message of both The Road Not Taken and Birches, I think it is also important to understand Robert Frost as a person and where he was in life when the two works were published. As such, this entire essay operates under four principles, things to keep in mind while reading: That Robert Frost was an intelligent man who was also well aware of his gift; that he had ego and recognition issues stemming from an alcoholic and often neglectful father; that the combination of the previous two resulted in severe depression, knowing that he could be great but not being able to do anything about it in terms of publication; as well as what Frost must have been feeling when The Road Not Taken and Birches finally found themselves in print on U.S. soil, in a collection of thirty-three poems titled Mountain Interval (New York, 1915). After nearly a decade of struggling for appreciation in America, Frost was able to find an audience receptive to his genius overseas in England, where A Boy’s Will (London, 1913) and North of Boston (London, 1914) were pressed with publishers David Nutt and David Null, respectively. It was due to this foreign interest that Frost was able to return home to the United States and pursue his literary career where it all began, and I think both The Road Not Taken and Birches are a testament to how much an ego that had previously been malnourished can rapidly inflate with so much sudden attention. While neither poem is commonly viewed in such a narcissistic light, I do believe that Frost’s abrupt success took a somewhat arrogant atmosphere in Mountain Interval, with these two selections in particular being the most cleverly disguised bits of conceit—though, after pouring over dozens of interpretations in order to find an according opinion, I have yet to unearth a single person in the universe who seems to agree with me.
In my mind, The Road Not Taken is Frost’s vulgar hand gesture to his peers at the time, those who had scoffed at his fondness and predilection for old style and convention, while Birches itself seems to be the conquering general’s whimsical desire for more of a fight, more enemies to replace the ones who are left cowering at his feet. I see that as their primary difference, two adventurous and outwardly ridiculous observations that—surprisingly—gain more and more credibility as we delve further into the actual poetry. (In truth, I almost dismissed the idea entirely, that Frost was gloating over his success, but as time went on and I looked closer at the source material, there was no denying the hunch. Robby absolutely had to brag.)
Let’s look at The Road Not Taken first, then, since it seems to be the more heavily quoted of the pair. Right off the bat, we start seeing Frost develop the punch line. Two roads he shows us in lines one through twelve, one that is worn and good and you can follow it with your eyes until it disappears around the bend and the other a grassy path, less traveled and wanting “wear.” Frost—and I think both Frost and the narrator are one and the same here and in Birches, too—finally tells us in the closing two lines that taking the second road has “made all the difference,” and this is obviously an allusion to his recent critical triumph. If the first, most traveled road is emblematic of that era’s creative trend—blank verse—and the latter is Frost’s defiance in the face of sensation, his stubborn refusal to pander to the crowd and alter how he believed poetry should be written, then it becomes easy to connect the dots between what seems to be helpful advice and the spiteful, malicious intent that truly hides behind Robby’s innocent exterior. “It has made all the difference,” he says. In other words, “Look at me! Look how I’ve finally broken through all your insults and became successful by being unique! It has made all the difference, the difference from being one of you herd creatures and my own distinct individual!” The tone is exceptionally condescending.
Birches, however, is a tad more complicated. It has more artsy, abstract elements involved and is nearly three times as long as its companion. In the face of higher hurdles, though, we can boil much of the poem down to three main elements that, once clarified, are a natural progression into the final twenty lines, the home stretch or the payoff.
First we have the trees themselves, things that I think are representative of Frost’s goals in life—not his life, but the things he wants to accomplish in it, an idea that holds true even when Frost introduces the grove because a person generally wants to realize a great many ambitions in their time on Earth, a great many goals. Reaching towards heaven from the top of the tree in line fifty-seven may be another clue Frost leaves us, to influence our thinking in this direction. Heaven is up; Heaven is higher. Goals are frequently thought of as things that we have to reach up towards, in Christianity the notion of Heaven being the premier target of one’s endeavors—the religious person’s ultimate goal. (Not knowing Frost’s own theological convictions, it is simple enough to wonder if the author, seeing himself as superior due to his accomplishments as some modern businessmen do, feels as though he’s earned his place beyond the Pearly Gates through sheer ability and not moral fiber as most men have to do. Dealing with egomania, which we may very well be doing if my theory holds, it’s hard to rule anything out as impossible. The recurrent mentioning of Heaven must hold some significance, anyway, for it to appear both in line thirteen and fifty-seven.)
Second are the boys, the swingers from the branches, who could logically be looked at as smaller steps toward conquering the objective, slowly pulling down all the branches until it’s defeated and the goal mastered. That’s why they have such positive connotation throughout, why they’re associated with baseball and summer—both fun things—because progress is most often linked with happiness. Gradually bowing the branches is something that everybody does, accounting for the fact that there are multiple boys instead of just one, and Frost obviously considers himself one of those boys, part of the throng of people who are pursuing their dreams… Which is how he can so easily switch gears in line forty one to single himself out, how he wishes he could still be a boy swinging from the branches, but now that he’s been published and is on top of the world that’s not entirely possible. The birch—and, indeed, the entire grove—has been conquered The race, knowing that he would win, is a challenge he wishes for again as most intelligent people yearn for challenges. Back to the introduction, the Blue General has seized the entire board and that particular game of RISK is over, never to be played again. He’s won and now he’s out of things to do. “How awesome am I to have done this?” he’s asking himself, patting himself on the back.
The third inciting element of Birches, and I think the most wrongly interpreted, is the ice storm. The storms here are characterized not as harbingers of death or negativity as the cold is in Fire & Ice, but as beautiful, powerful things that take the tree by force, bringing about the fulfillment of the goal as fast as swinging boys could never imagine. The ice storms are the books sold in England, the promotion from Private to Private First Class or the skip from bachelorhood to marriage if your goal is to have a family. They are the bigger steps that only come along every once in awhile, as evidenced by lines five through eleven, where Frost talks about how quickly the ice is made and then thawed in the sun—temporary and unexpected. These storms become beautiful through Frost’s word choice, being called at one point “crystal” and then again in the sensual way he recounts that moment in nature when an icicle drops and shatters on the snow. They are powerful because, “Look! Here are the boys and this is how much greater the storms affect the trees than the boys!” I think the power detailed here is another compass pointer to Mister Frost’s feeling of high self-worth, a tell-tale sign of how immense he thought he’d become. Power is an important concern for people who need to be recognized; it’s another form of attention.
It is from these three definitions that Frost declares himself at the finish line with the first place trophy, and I believe the author writes Birches this way so that he can present a full concept, the definitions followed by his opinions on them. Once Frost has gotten the clinical descriptions out of the way, he’s able to move into a deeper subject without losing any of his audience. That way it feels unabridged and whole, while I most certainly believe that The Road Not Taken was left intentionally short and sweet. The best revenge usually is, and it doesn’t take a whole lot of words to turn your nose up at somebody… You know? He used as many words as he needed to get the point across.
All those things being said—the unlike purposes of the poems, their alikeness in ego, and their disparity of length—the differences and similarities between The Road Not Taken and Birches take on entirely new meanings. The latter is Frost telling us what it’s like to be at the top, while the former is his report of the journey from the end of the road, but what invariably connects the two, makes them more akin than poles apart, is the evidence that, either way, he’s done what he’s set out to do. He’s famous and now both his intelligence and ego have been satiated to the point where he knows he’s smart and now everybody else knows it, too—like there’s nothing left to prove. This set talks about the same thing, and are an uncanny pictorial of what Frost might have been on the inside instead of the out, revealing Frost to be exactly what his work was: Human.
