Birches
Author: Robert Frost
Frost, Robert. “Birches." Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44260/birches.
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1 When I see birches bend to left and right
2 Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
3 I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
4 But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay
5 As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them
6 Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
7 After a rain. They click upon themselves
8 As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
9 As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
10 Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
11 Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—
12 Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
13 You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
14 They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
15 And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
16 So low for long, they never right themselves:
17 You may see their trunks arching in the woods
18 Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
19 Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
20 Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
21 But I was going to say when Truth broke in
22 With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
23 I should prefer to have some boy bend them
24 As he went out and in to fetch the cows—
25 Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
26 Whose only play was what he found himself,
27 Summer or winter, and could play alone.
28 One by one he subdued his father's trees
29 By riding them down over and over again
30 Until he took the stiffness out of them,
31 And not one but hung limp, not one was left
32 For him to conquer. He learned all there was
33 To learn about not launching out too soon
34 And so not carrying the tree away
35 Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
36 To the top branches, climbing carefully
37 With the same pains you use to fill a cup
38 Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
39 Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
40 Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
41 So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
42 And so I dream of going back to be.
43 It's when I'm weary of considerations,
44 And life is too much like a pathless wood
45 Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
46 Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
47 From a twig's having lashed across it open.
48 I'd like to get away from earth awhile
49 And then come back to it and begin over.
50 May no fate willfully misunderstand me
51 And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
52 Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
53 I don't know where it's likely to go better.
54 I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
55 And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
56 Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
57 But dipped its top and set me down again.
58 That would be good both going and coming back.
59 One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
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