Birches: Going and Coming Back

By Gabriel Hartley — 22-26 July 2020

[NOTICE: This is a draft of a work in progress. Please do not quote or copy without my permission. Thanks! — Gabriel Hartley]

hartleyg@ohio.edu

Among Robert Frost’s most popular poems, “Birches” was written in 1913 (the same year as the first publication of A Boy’s Will), initially published in 1915 in Atlantic Monthly and then again in the following year in Frost’s third collection of poetry, Mountain Interval (1916). In this poem we see Frost struggling with the same internal battle that I have referred to in my chapter on “Waiting—Afield at Dusk” and “Mowing” as one between a kind of perceptual-philosophical realism (what in “Birches” will be characterized as Matter-of-Fact Truth) and, in contrast, a visionary poetics of environmental engagement (now characterized as Dream). I argue in my earlier chapter that, despite appearances to the contrary, in “Mowing” Frost comes away with the kind of visionary consciousness that he arrived at in “Waiting,” a growing awareness of the poet’s imaginal participation in all aspects of the world around him or her. My goal here is to determine the ways in which Frost approaches this same split allegiance to two (at least) contrasting modes of consciousness within the inner engagement that plays itself out in “Birches.” And as before, I will approach this task by means of a word-by-word delving into the unfolding consciousness of the poem.

In the opening lines we read: “When I see birches bend to left and right / Across the lines of straighter darker trees, / I like to think some boy’s been swinging them” (lines 1-3). The question of perception is foregrounded immediately when the poet states, “When I see.” The larger question of the poem involves an exploration into the relative values inherent in two competing modes of engagement with—or two ways of seeing—the world around us. It is a question of choices when we find ourselves facing two roads diverging in a wood. Which way of seeing is socially acceptable? Which mode of engagement will dominate as we look out at what lies before us? This question of social acceptability is figured immediately in the opposition of left and right leaning trees that visually complicate the normalizing pattern of “the lines of straighter darker trees.” These bent trees arc across the normalizing visual field and in this way visually complicate the “natural,” acceptable order of things. Importantly, the terms “left and right” are not to be subsumed into conventional categories marking political tendencies: both left and right together challenge the straight and narrow of this visual order.

So what the poet “sees” in the details he lays out in the first three lines is a visual suggestion of the kind of counter-cultural bending of the rules that he wants to associate with the willful freedom of boyhood. Whether this freedom pertains to all boys or just to some one boy (such as himself) remains to be seen—although the gendered characterization of childhood rule-bending here certainly seems to exclude “some girls” from this challenge to cultural expectations, not a surprising context for a poem written at this time when women do not yet even have the legal right to vote. As the poem develops, it becomes increasingly clear that the poet identifies with, imagines himself as being, just such a birch-bending boy.

“But . . .”

As soon as the poet admits to what he would like to think, the internalized voice of social reason immediately breaks into the stream of consciousness and demands attention: “But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay / As ice-storms do. . .” (4-5). Notice that the poet’s desired field of engagement is nowhere near so wild as the moment in “Mowing” when the forbidden consciousness of fairies or elves weaving wheat into gold makes itself available, only to be immediately rejected. The poet’s desired mode of consciousness in “Birches” so far is simply that one in which the magic of childhood challenges to the presumed order of things can still resonate in adulthood. “But . . .” And in order to support this intrusion into the relatively tame dreamwork of the poem, the Voice of Fact goes on, looping the “you” of the reader into this order of realism:

 . . 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-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel. (5-9)

One thing to note here is that even this matter-of-fact recognition of the-way-things-are remains spellbound by the sheer beauty of this natural scene. The play of sunlight and breeze on ice-laden branches opens up the prism of the visual and aural sensory-scape to the splendor of sheer existence, so much so that the poet can’t help falling into the cadence and music of a line like “As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.” The speaker has earned the verb “crazes” by this point as even the “natural” perspective is crazed and cracked into the perspectival joy that saturates the poem—so much so that the factual description of the transforming scene falls back into the figurative consciousness of poetic interrelationality:

Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
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. (10-13)

As soon as the ice is transmuted by degrees into crystal shells and then into broken glass, the speaker returns to the poetic mode of thinking of line three that, having been subject to cancellation by the intervening “but,” now wants to suggest that the inner dome of heaven has fallen. The enveloping work of fielding established in the poem “Waiting—Afield at Dusk” now expresses itself through the released embrace of the englobing Ptolemaic closure of Neoplatonic sky. Heaven now magically lies at our feet.

But another “natural” transformation takes place when the sun has not cracked and crazed the inner dome of heaven that still weighs down the trunks of these birches: “They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load, / And they seem not to break” (14-15). The poet’s words themselves drag the tonality of the line down to its bass consonantal base of bs and ks and ds, grounding the language in its tribal texture, only to suggest a springing up again in the looping airiness of the lines that follow that is denied the trees themselves: “. . . though once they are bowed / So low for long, they never right themselves” (15-16). The counterpoint of opposing perspectives that animates the poem expresses itself as much in the music of the poem as in its matter. It goes on in this way to the point that the poet cannot complete a mundane description of these arcing birches (“You may see their trunks arching in the woods / Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground,” 17-18) without slipping into poetic expressiveness (“Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair / Before them over their heads to dry in the sun” 19-20). The simile forces itself onto the scene at the very moment that the speaker is trying to ground his perception in “Truth.”

It is at this point that the poet recognizes that there is a higher truth calling for recognition than the everyday realistic consensus that insists on stopping his imaginative flight and anchoring him to facts of weather:

But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows—
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone. (21-27)

The poet comes to accept that there was a reason for his initial impulse to draw on a conception of causality that sees the impact of childhood consciousness and actions on the world around him. For the boy “too far from town to learn baseball”—a game that would otherwise provide him with the socializing opportunity to test the realm of limits and rules and competition—the stretching of limits can only come from the solitary challenges that he can imagine for himself. And if he cannot compete with his peers, he can at least engage in an oedipal drama that perhaps provides him with greater lessons than boyhood baseball:

One by one he subdued his father’s trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. . . . (28-32)

This theme of challenging the rules, of pushing the limits, is one of the predominant elements in Frost’s poetry. While he might at one point famously say that he’d sooner play tennis without a net than to write free verse, he shows in moments such as this that the pursuit of challenges outside of society’s rules might prove to be even more important than the presumed advantages of the socialized child. If he can successfully take the stiffness out of his father’s trees and leave them hanging limp, then he has conquered far more than the boys in baseball or tennis. The bent-over birch trees are trophy enough for him. He has left the signature of his presence on the world even in his absence and has created the imaginal space for the poet yet to come. The boy’s forest gymnastics or solitary pole-vault event make way for the poet’s own mastery of the physics of liminality:

. . . He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
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,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground. (32-40)

“Even above the brim”: the boy becomes a model for one whose awareness of physical limitations allow him to pull off such an apparently gravity-defying feat—the same kind of apprehension of competing forces that allow for the tight-rope walk that the poet here hopes to achieve in the intricate balance of competing paradigms of Matter-of-Fact Truth and Dream. And here it is on the dream side of the brim that the poetic magic unfolds: “So was I once myself a swinger of birches. / And so I dream of going back to be” (41-42).

What conditions within the stated terms of the poem itself might lead one to prefer Dream consciousness to the Matter-of-Fact? The poet enlightens us in the following:

It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
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. (43-49)

The function of Dream as presented here is presumably to provide an escape from the traumatic confusion of this pathless wood that teaches you not to walk through the underbrush with your eyes open. No wonder the would-be dreamer wants to get away from earth—but just for a while. These moments, then, are “temporary stays against confusion,” as Frost would say about the function of poetry in general, moments for recouping your will and energy in order to return and begin bending your father’s trees in more adult ways. But why would one wish to return to such scenes of trauma?

May no fate willfully 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. (50-53)

To project yourself into the heavens completely would be akin to suicide or, at least, abandonment of our earthly project as humans, a form of psychic suicidal surrender if not a physical one. And perhaps we are human for a reason, to fulfil a certain purpose—and perhaps that purpose is to love. Earth, this life, this existence—this is where we learn the ways in which the soul extends itself into communal oneness despite the face-burning trials of the pathless wood with its “lines of straighter darker trees” (2). “I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree” (54), the poet tells us. But go where? This sounds like the “I’d like to go by” that our grandparents express to tell us as children how they would prefer to die. And yet death is not the poet’s goal:

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. (54-57)

Dream is not escape, then, a longing for death but an impulse to transformation. This carving out of a visionary path in an otherwise tangled wood gives us the strength and composure, the higher human resources necessary for fulfilling our human purpose here on earth. Through this poetic dream vision we project ourselves toward heaven and nourish ourselves by gaining the kind of higher vision of our higher selves adequate to our life project so that, rejuvenated and newly determined, we are then able to see the actual matter-of-fact truth that allows us to say:

That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches. (58-59)

xxx

Birches: Going and Coming Back

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