Robert Frost

 Thinking Activity: Robert Frost

Hello Readers! This blog is a response to the Thinking Activity which is assigned by Megha Ma'am, Department of English, MKBU. In this blog I am going to discuss  Robert Frost and his famous Poems.

Introduction of Robert Frost:-

"Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words."

                                - Robert Frost

Robert Frost (1874-1963) is regarded as one of the greatest American Poets of the 20th century. His work was initially published in England before it was published in the United States. He is known  for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American Colloquial speech. Robert Frost frequently wrote about settings from rural life in New England in the early 20th century, using them to examine complex social and philosophical themes. His famous Poems are as below.

• Mending Wall
• Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
• Birches
• Tree at My Window
• Acquainted with the Night
• Fire and Ice
• Moving
• Desert Places
• The Road not Taken
• Out Out
• Nothing Gold Can Stay
• Home Burial

In 1894, Frost had his first poem, "My Butterfly: an Elegy," published in The Independent, a weekly literary journal based in New York City. It was at this time that Frost met fellow poets Ezra Pound and Edward Thomas, two men who would affect his life in significant ways. Pound and Thomas were the first to review his work in a favourable light, as well as provide significant encouragement. Frost credited Thomas's long walks over the English Landscape as the inspiration for one of his most famous Poems, "The Road not Taken". Many of poems are about the natural world, with woods and trees featuring prominently in some of his most famous and widely Popular  poems. Themes of his poems are as below.

• Everyday life
• Human Contact with the Natural World
• Human Love
• Life's Struggles
• Morality
• Nature
• New England
• Rural life
• Self-realisation
• Simultaneous Validity of Opposing Ideas

Frost mastered  blank verse for use in such dramatic narratives as "Mending Wall" and "Home Burial" becoming one of the few Modern poets to use it both appropriately and well. Frost was honoured frequently during his lifetime and is the only poet to receive four Pulitzer prizes for poetry. His Awards are as below.

• Pulitzer prize for Poetry
• American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Poetry
• Robert Frost Medal
• United States Poet Laureate
• Congressional Gold Medal
• Bollingen Prize

He was awarded the congressional Gold Medal in 1960 for his poetic works. On July 22, 1961, Frost was named Poet Laureate of Vermont. Though Frost's work is principally associated with the life and landscape of New England and though he was a poet of traditional verse forms and metrics who remained steadfastly aloof from the poetic movements and fashions of his time. Frost is anything but merely a regional poet. The author of searching, and often dark, meditations on universal themes, he is a modern poet in his adherence to language as it is actually spoken, in the phychological complexity of his portraits, and in the degree to which his work is infused with layers of ambiguity and irony.

Birches:-

Birches is a poem written by Robert Frost and published in The Atlantic in 1915. It was published as 'A Group of Poems', along with 'The Road not Taken' and 'The Sounds of Trees'. It was also included in his third collection of poetry that was titled Mountain Interval in 1916. The poem was originally titled 'Swinging Birches', as the poem is describing the game that children used to often play in new England as they would swing on birch trees.

Structure of Poem :-

• Written in Pentameter
• Lacks rhyme scheme
• Each line has 10-12 syllables
• Lots of enjambment
• 1st person narrator 

Meaning of Birches:-

'Birches' has two meanings: a literal meaning and a figurative meaning.

• The literal meaning of this novel is that it is a description of the fun and playful act of swinging from trees, which is what the speaker used to do as a child.
• The figurative meaning is a bit more complex. While the action of swinging still remains in the figurative meaning, it's more in reference to the swinging between what is real and imaginary. In reality, the speaker has grown up, and is now an adult with responsibilities. He is on the earth, and does not get to play and forget his problems so easily anymore. In his imaginary and happy world, he gets to escape from this. He can become a child again, swinging up to the heavens for a little while, avoiding his responsibilities and playing like a kid again.

Summary:-

Whenever speaker sees stooped birch trees, which stand out against the surrounding upright trees, the speaker likes to imagine that they're bent this way because a young boy has been holding onto their thin upper branches and then, with the flexible trees in hand, swinging to the ground. That said, the speaker knowns that swinging from the trees doesn't actually cause them to stay bent down the way ice- storms do.

Most people, the speaker posits, have seen birch trees covered in ice on bright mornings after a winter's rain. Birches like this scratch against one another in the wind, the ice around the branches glinting as it begins to crack. Before long, the sun heats up the ice- covered branches and causes the fine layers of ice to fall, breaking across the hard crust that the snow has created on the ground. Falling and breaking like this creates so many shards of ice that one might think some kind of shere in heaven has shattered and fallen to earth.

At this point, the speaker returns to the original focus of the poem, having gotten wrapped up in describing the effect of ice storms. Originally, the speaker meant to say that it's preferable to imagine that a boy bent the birch trees by swinging from them on his way to tend to his family's cows. This boy, the speaker imagines, lived too deep in the woods to play baseball in town, and instead had to find his own sources of entertainment, amusing himself all through the year. Gradually, the boy bent all the birches on his father's property by swinging from their tops, which made the trees flexible and droopy. He did this so much, in fact, that there weren't any birches in the area that hadn't succumbed to him.

The boy learned how to safely swing from the birch trees, learning that it's important to not jump before reaching the past where the trunk is most flexible, since otherwise the tree could snap and fall quiqly to the ground. The boy maintained his composure as he climbed all the way up to the highest branches, moving with the same care one might use when slowly filling a cup to the very top or even just beyond the top.

The speaker used to be the kind of boy who swung from birch trees like this, and now fantasizes about one day swinging from the birches again. This fantasy crops up when the speaker becomes overwhelmed by the details and frustration of everyday life,an experience that is like trying to navigate through a stretch of woods without any kind of trail, as trees and spider webs assault the speaker's face, which gets scratched by a small stick that cuts across the eye.

The speaker says that it would be nice to escape earth for a bit and then, after a little while, return and start all over again. This is not to say that the speaker wants some kind of omniscient being to misinterpret and partially fulfill this wish by taking the speaker away from earth for good without any chance of return. The speaker believe that earth is the only place to fully enjoy things like love, and there's no other place where things might be better than they are here.

The speaker wants to die by climbing a birch tree, scaling it's dark branches and it's snow covered trunk in the direction of heaven, until the speaker got so high that the tree could no longer support the weight and slowly bent over to place the speaker back on the ground. This feeling of escaping earth while also returning to it, the speaker says, would be very nice. There are worse things than being someone who swings from birch trees.

Significantly, the speaker's desire to escape from the rational world is inconclusive. He wants to escape as a boy climbing toward heaven, but he also wants to return to the earth: both "going and coming back". The freedom of imagination is appealing and wondrous, but the narrator still cannot avoid returning to "Truth" and his responsibilities on the ground; the escape is only a temporary one. The poem is full of ambiguity and it has got a very aesthetic sense to it. For easy understanding about poem watch the  b video below.

Themes :-

Youth :-

Youth, like death, is a constant backdrop for many of Frost's poems; the speaker of "Birches" never sees a boy or comes across one. He only imagines one, and the boy that he does imagine is himself at a younger age. The boy seems to be similar to William Wordsworth and Walt Whitman's portrayals of boys. These boys have their own rules and wisdom that they can pass on to the older ready for adventures in nature and represent the wild, untamed state of 'Man' that remains good and moral even though no one is there to govern him.

Man and the Natural World:-

In this poem Frost plays around with many ideas of two traditions. The first is the Romantic tradition, poets like Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats often set their characters in nature. The character would embark on adventures or walk. He would have many interection with nature e.g. Nature challenges him, he feels at one with Nature etc, The other tradition toned down the scary part of Nature and almost made nature into a philosophy or religion.

Isolation:-

As with much of Frost's poetry, "Birches" creates a mood of loneliness and isolation. Some factors that contribute to the mood include the winter weather, which seems to cut the speaker off from other people, and the speaker's discussion of the boy growing up on an isolated farm. The speaker's loneliness may be the result of adult concerns and considerations.

Spirituality:-

Although Robert Frost is not the kind of poet to insert religious imagery into his poems in "Birches", Frost mentions "heaven" twice. Notice how it is always with a lower case and is more suggestive of the sky than paradise.

Figure of speech:-

Robert Frost has used a number of figures of speech to enrich the quality of the language of the poem. This includes

• Simile
• Onomatopoeia
• Repetition
• Contrast and 
• Personification

Rhyme scheme:-

Birches is written in Blank verse.

Conclusion:-

Thus, we can say that "Birches" by Robert Frost communicates an adult's desire to escape the realities of adulthood for a while through the fun of a playing child. The speaker is nostalgic for the carefree experience of swinging from a birch tree, and feels as though children were able to find fun in the most boring of times.

Thank you for reading and visiting....

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Image :- 2

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