The Philosophy of Birches :: Robert Frost Birches Essays

The school of thought of Birches The philosophy expressed in Birches poses no threat to popular set or beliefs, and it is so appealingly affirmative that many readers adjudge appreciate the poem as a masterpiece. Among Frosts most celebrated works, perhaps nonwithstanding Stopping by Woods on a Snowy level ranks ahead of it. Yet to critics like Brooks and Squires, the personas philosophical stance in Birches is a serious weakness. . . . The didactic and philosophical element that some critics have attacked strikes others as the very core of Frosts virtue. . . . Perhaps impartial observers can postulate the notion that Birches is neither as bad as its harshest opponents suggest nor as good as its most adoring advocates claim. . . . Birches . . . contains three fairly lengthy descriptions that do not involve unusual perspectives. In fact, the most headmaster and distinctive vision in the poem--the passage treating the starter on the trees (ll. 5-14)--is swing both by t he self-consciousness of its final line (Youd think the versed dome of heaven had fallen) and by the two much to a greater extent conventionally perceived environments that follow it the rural boyhood of the swinger of birches (ll. 23-40) and the roadless wood, which represents lifes considerations (ll. 44-47). As a result, the poems ardent concluding lines--its closing pronouncements on life, death, and human aspiration--do not arise from a particular experience. Instead, they are presented as doctrines that we must drive or reject on the basis of our credence in the talker as a wise countryman whose familiarity with birch trees, ice storms, and pathless woods gives him authority as a philosopher. Since in Birches the natural object--tree, ice crystal, pathless wood, etc.--functions as proof of the speakers rusticity, Frost has no need for odd perspectives, and therefore the poem does little to convince us that an experience, to use Robert Langbaums wording, is actually taking place, that the object is seen and not merely remembered from a public or abstract view of it. This is not to deny that the poem contains some splendid descriptive passages (especially memorable are the clicking, cracking, shattering ice crystals in lines 7-11 and the boys painstaking climb and sudden, exhilarating descent in lines 35-40), and without doubt, the closing lines offer an kind exegesis of swinging birches as a way of life. But though we hire a great deal about this speakers beliefs and preferences, we find at lowest that he has not revealed himself as profoundly as does the speaker in After Apple-Picking.