Analysis of Birches Essay -- Robert Frost Birches Essays

Analysis of Birches The discursive blank-verse meditation Birches does not center on a continuously encountered and revealing nature scene rather, it builds a photomosaic of thoughts from fragments of memory and fantasy. Its vividness and genial, bittersweet speculation help make it 1 of Frosts most popular verse forms, and because its shifts of metaphor and tone invite varying version it has also received much critical discussion, not always admiring. The verse form moves back and forth between two visual perspectives birch trees as bent by boys playful swinging and by ice storms, the thematic interweaving being somewhat puzzling. The birches bent across the lines of straighter darker trees subtly introduce the radical of imagination and will opposing darker realities. Then, almost a third of the poem describes how ice storms bend these trees permanently, unlike the action of boys this scene combines images of beauty and of distortion. scrap shells suggest radiating light and color, and the trees bowed to the level of the bracken, suggest suffering, which is instantly lighte...