Birches

1102 Words3 Pages

Robert Frost in my personal opinion is one of the most well known poets. Frost was idolized by most future writers, but without Frost’s idolizations of Thoreau, Emerson, Dickinson and Whitman; we would not have other Pulitzer Prize winners of New Hampshire, A further Range and A witness tree. (Robert) When Robert Frost passed away in 1963 At the time President Kennedy was at his funeral and produced his eulogy with it being said “President Kennedy's eulogy almost inevitably referred to the 'miles' Frost had travelled, and his final 'sleep': while he had refused to address the cosmic implications of human existence, Frost's poetry had given his public a dark but nonetheless strangely comforting new lexis of death” (Johnson) One of the memorable parts of President Kennedy’s speech was when he was quoted with saying “nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope” (Kennedy)
Robert Frost engages the reader in a tension driven metaphor which relates the phenomena of natural processes to what can be regarded as the metaphysical transcendence of ones imagination though time. In this exploration, he reveals the conflict of ones volition against the natural, opposing forces. In the first three lines, the poet sees birch trees swaying in the wind, and likens the movement to young boy swinging on the branches.
But he pits the experience of human volition against natural processes in saying that swinging does not keep the branches down. Naturally, children don’t swing with the intention of imposing their volition upon a branch; rather, Frost is creating a metaphorical tension between the implications of human will and the balance of nature, which is commonly regarded as static. Although nature is static, the ...

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...unded demands of the world. The twig against the eye is a reminder of his youthful idealism, which is entwined with nature. However, Frost reveals that he has learned much in his years. He would like to go back and allow the branches to throw him upward toward transcendence, but he asks that fate not misunderstand his intentions. He doesn’t want to be thrown forever into transcendence because that would separate him from Love, which is earth-bound. He uses black and white to suggest the necessary duality between striving for transcendence and being on earth, where love and community also aids in the experience he seeks. He shows this in a metaphor where he climbs the tree to the top, and it gently brings him back down to the earth. In this metaphor, he is not only showing the duality behind transcendence, but he also reveals the unity between nature and humanity.

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