by Kerry Michael Wood

Created on: January 31, 2009   Last Updated: November 07, 2009

Robert Frost's Birches is 59 lines of blank verse, or unrhymed iambic pentameter, that divides into three sections. The first 20 lines graphically describe the slender, flexible trees and how they may become bent temporarily by "some boy's . . . swinging [on] them" or permanently by ice storms.

As early as line 1 we see the poet employing the kinds of devices that raise blank verse to a level above prose: the interior rhyme of "When" and "bend, the short "e"s of those words assonating with "left": the assonant vowel-sounds in "I" and "right." Further along Those long "i" sounds already mentioned are heard again in the repeated pronoun I and "ice," and the alliterative "l's" of "lines . . .like . . .Loaded" become an ear-pleasing pattern. That's all I will point out about the vowel and consonant music of this wondrous poem so that I can keep this article under the length limit.

This first movement of the poem is descriptive, and the visual and auditory images stand out clealy even to one who has never experienced an ice storm, much less had an opportunity to be a swinger on birches.

. . . Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-coloured
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel

No, Mr. Frost, I have never seen them, but I feel I have thanks to the resonant clarity of your verse. I now visualize them and hear the sounds of their clicking in the wintry breeze, the clacking and crazing of their ice coatings that you compare to brittle enamel. I feel I'm experiencing a New Hampshire winter. I'm a little less chilly as I read about the sun's warmth and see with my mind's eye the

. . .shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow crust.

I picture the glistening fragments as "heaps of broken glass to sweep away" as though "the inner dome of heaven had fallen." Meanwhile the lovely trees with their white trunk bark and black branches bend under their winter weight to the level of the ferny bracken, performing a deep obeisance from which they never resurrect themselves. The picture is made even clearer by this segment-concluding simile comparing the birches to "girls on hands and knees that throw their hair/Before them over their heads to dry in the sun."

With the second movement of our visual and musical composition, arrives a shift from factual observation to fanciful imaginings. Line 21 talks about what the speaker had intended to say had he not

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next Page >>