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Birches: Poetry Review - College Essays

Birches: Poetry Review

Birches is a nostalgic poem filled with fond memories and fantasies, yet there is a longing for escape underwritten in the clever choice of words. Robert Frost sets up a conversation with someone’s present self and this person’s self as a young boy. There is a man narrating this poem. The old man is looking at his present life full of hard ships. He is also looking back on his life as a child, wishing he could somehow go back to a better time filled with pleasant memories.
In the first twenty-two stanzas of the poem the old man is having a dialogue with himself. He is arguing about whether or not nature bends the birches or a young boy. He speaks to himself “I like to think some ...

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he was creating his own happiness.
Soon into his pleasant fantasy, reality takes over. What has he accomplished or become? Why does he not have the same feelings he once had? Because “They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load” of his harsh life (14). His life of hard ships has erased all happiness in life. The line “From a twig’s having lashed across it open” (47) means something severely emotional has happened in the man’s life to cause him to harden. This event has led him to believe that his life is like a pathless wood. In other words his life has no means to an end, no purpose any longer.
The last part of birches deals with another fantasy of almost all people, a longing to start over again. It is common to hear someone wishing “If I could have done it all over again”. He speaks to himself reassuringly “So I was once a swinger of birches/ And so I dream of going back to be” (41-42). He is content now because his life has not been pathless. He has led ...

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Birches: Poetry Review. (2007, April 11). Retrieved January 20, 2026, from http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Birches-Poetry-Review/63171

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PAPER DETAILS

Added: 4/11/2007 01:28:05 AM
Category: Poetry & Poets
Type: Premium Paper
Words: 417
Pages: 2

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