Birch trees are naturally very flexible. Frost explains that this is caused by ice storms placing weight upon the branches: “When I see birches bend to left and right / Across the line of straighter darker trees, / I like to think some boy’ been swinging in them. / But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay. / Ice storms do that. Often you must have seen them”. He writes of the difference between childhood and adulthood in the first two lines of this passage. The comparison is of the youthful birches with children playing in them to the dark and rigidly conforming straight tree. The “straighter darker trees” are the symbol of adulthood, of the ridiculous redundancy of the private sector. Frost appears to despise this repetitiveness and for this reason, he becomes a poet. In this occupation he can use his imagination, and walk the border between the birches and the straight trees.
The theme of the poem refers to finding a balance between realism and imagination, and that finding this balance would help ease the pains of life downtrodden times. There is, however, a twist to this theme: “They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load / And they seem not to break; though one they are bowed / So low for long, they never right themselves:” A traumatic event in one’s life, an ice storm in relation to birch trees, will never cease to exist in the mind, regardless of the imagination. These events will gradually bend one’s inner spectrum, making a full recovery impossible; regardless of what comforts may be available.
Realism is represented as the personified villain Truth: “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”. Truth is realism, or the lack of imagination that tells of the scientific theory of why birches bend. Truth is the antagonist, the guard and apostle of the “straighter darker trees”, who haunts the speaker with where he should be and what he should be doing, not the romanticizing of childhood and birch-swinging, but his work, and the redundancy he deserves to be put through, according to Truth.
In the next section, Robert Frost writes of “some boy.” He is stereotypically a New England farm boy who, being unable to play baseball because of the lack of children his age nearby, plays in the forest, climbing birch trees. The boy has autobiographical implications for Frost, who was raised on a New England farm. This reminiscing, romanticizing section allows the speaker to indulge in his fruitless yearnings for a return to his childhood.
The final section contains the speaker’s admittance that he was also a “swinger of birches” as the boy was in the second section. He also states his wish to go back to those days in which he could live the life of the boy. He dreads the world he lives in. “ I’d like to get away from earth awhile/ … / 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.” The use of the word “toward” in italics implies that the upper thrust of birch swinging gives a taste of heaven, as was stated earlier involving ice storms: “ Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away / You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.” The speaker finds that swinging on a birch tree gives one a piece of heaven. The ups and downs of the birch trees offer various contrasting experiences that the speaker uses to keep himself sane. These rises and falls represent heaven and earth, the difference of truth and realism, rigidity and reckless enjoyment, adulthood and childhood, and flight and return. These ups and downs are what Frost strives for. He lives as a poet to constantly ride these birch trees, so he can find the compromise between these figurative pleasures and pains, and according to him, there is no better occupation:
“One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.”
