Robert Frost Overview

Robert Frost is considered one of the “most popular American poets of his time.” He won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry four times. Congress also voted him a gold medal, in “recognition of his poetry, which has enriched the culture of the United States and the philosophy of the world” (Costello 543). The poem “Birches” was first published in 1915 (Thomason 18). In Robert Frost’s “Birches,” the theme of reality vs. imagination is discovered through images of bent birches, symbolism of a boy swinging the trees, and the tone of words used.

The conflict of reality vs. imagination is explored through images of bent birches. Reality is depicted as birches bending and cracking after a freezing rain from the ice that was left behind. Frost let’s the reader know that this is reality in lines 3-4: “I like to think some boy’s been swinging them. But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay.” He tells the reader the real reason of what bent the birches in line 5 when he states “Ice-storms do that.” In the next six lines, Erica Smith notes, “we are inclined to view the ice storm negatively because Frost has used it to refute his hoped-for explanation in line three” (Smith 20). A couple of lines later Frost gives us an insight into how reality is:

They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load

And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed

So low for long, they never right themselves.

The birches are dragged to the floor and they don’t break. The situation is that after they are kept down for a long time they can never be straight again. They are permanently stuck in this “bowed” position.

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And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed

So low for long, they never right themselves.

We can compare these three lines to our lives because reality is that although we have problems we don’t “break” or fall apart every time a problem arises. There is a point in lines fifteen and sixteen because when we have a huge problem that makes a big impact in our lives we “never right” ourselves. In other words, that problem is always in the back of our minds even after it’s over. “Years afterwards” that problem might still be thought of in a situation just like Frost describes: “You may see their trunks arching in the woods Years afterwards…” (lines 17, 18).

Reality vs. imagination is explored with the symbolism of a boy used to represent imagination. Despite the fact that he knows the truth of why the birches are bent, he refines the image of the boy in lines 28-29, by stating “One by one he subdued his father’s trees / By riding them down over and over again.” Frost gives a clear explanation of how the boy swings the trees in these lines. Frost states a couple of lines later that the boy knows how far to bend the tree before he can break it. This enhances the idea that the boy plays by himself because he’s “too far away from town” (line 25). In lines thirty-one and thirty-two the boy is victorious of putting the trees down, “…not one was left / For him to conquer.” Here Frost shows that imagination just had victory over reality. His interpretation replaced the reality of the ice storm being the cause (Thomason 15,16).

This brings us back to the idea that the boy portrays imagination because when we imagine it is to escape reality. For example, if we live in a regular house we might state one-day, “Imagine I wake up one morning and I own a mansion.” By stating this, we would be escaping reality for a moment, picturing how we might feel if it were to really come true. With this in mind, Frost is suggesting that if we learn how to master our skill in imagining then it will increase the ability we have to handle any bad situation that might arise in our lives. For this reason the speaker supports the reader to use their imagination in line 48 by letting us know that he himself likes “to get away from earth awhile.”

The final way Frost gets the theme across of reality vs. imagination is through the tone used in the poem. He chooses certain words and details that make the point clearer that the speaker prefers imagination but is still aware of reality. In line nine there is a hint of destruction when the sun “cracks and crazes their enamel” (Thomason 15). Then in lines ten through thirteen, he describes the forest scene:

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.

The words “shattering and avalanching,” in line 10 the reader gets the feeling of disaster. With this feeling, the speaker makes reality sound harsh and cruel. The “heaps of broken glass” makes it seem like “the inner dome of heaven had fallen,” suggests a commotion in the universe. The speakers’ imagination is soon disturbed by “Truth” in lines 21, 22:

But I was going to say when Truth broke in

With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm

Here the speaker is reminded that reality is that the ice storms were the cause for the birches to bend. Since the speaker sounds bothered about Truth intruding, he pushes reality out of the way by bringing imagination into the picture in line 23 “I should prefer to have some boy bend them.” This line is important because Frost is rejecting the limits of the outside world and choosing his own reason of why the birches are bent (Thomason 15).

The theme of reality vs. imagination is explored through images of bent birches, symbolism of a boy swinging the trees, and the tone of words used. Reality is portrayed as bent birches, and imagination is portrayed as the boy swinging the trees. The tone Frost uses proves that he prefers imagination rather than reality. In the last line of the poem, “One could be worse than be a swinger of birches,” the speaker sounds calm and relaxed. He sounds ready to face reality again after taking a trip into the forest. Frost depicted that when reality “is too much like a pathless wood,” (line 44) that’s when he likes to “get away from earth awhile” (line 48). Frost also suggests that it “would be good both going and coming back” (line 58). He likes the idea of imagining occasionally. As human beings, we tend to imagine many things during our lives but we are always on the run that we don’t realize all the times that we are actually taking a mental vacation away from reality.

Works Cited

Bogarad, Carley and Jan Zlotnik Schmidt, eds. Legacies. Forst Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1995.

Costello, Bonnie. “Frost, Robert Lee.” The World Book Encyclopedia, 1993 ed.

Smith Erica. “Criticism.” Poetry for Students. Ed. Elizabeth Thomason. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Group, 2001. 20-21.

Thomason, Elizabeth, ed. Poetry for Students. Farmington Hills: Gale Group, 2001.