By Robert Frost
When I see birches bend to left and right Across the lines of straighter darker trees, I like to think some boy’s been swinging them. But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning After a rain. They click upon themselves As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel. 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. 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: You may see their trunks arching in the woods Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground, Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair Before them over their heads to dry in the sun. 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 As he went out and in to fetch the cows— Some boy too far from town to learn baseball, Whose only play was what he found himself, Summer or winter, and could play alone.) One by one he subdued his father’s trees By riding them down over and over again Until he took the stiffness out of them, And not one but hung limp, not one was left For him to conquer. He learned all there was To learn about not launching out too soon And so not carrying the tree away Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise To the top branches, climbing carefully With the same pains you use to fill a cup Up to the brim, and even above the brim. Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish, Kicking his way down through the air to the ground. So was I once myself a swinger of birches. And so I dream of going back to be. It’s when I’m weary of considerations, And life is too much like a pathless wood Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs Broken across it, and one eye is weeping From a twig’s having lashed across it open. I’d like to get away from earth awhile And then come back to it and begin over. May no fate willfully misunderstand me And half grant what I wish and snatch me away Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love: I don’t know where it’s likely to go better. 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. That would be good both going and coming back. One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
On This Page: Summary · Background · Analysis and Themes · Form and Technique · Notable Lines · Glossary · Related Poems
Summary
The speaker sees birch trees bent over and likes to imagine that a boy has been swinging on them, riding the slender trunks down to the ground. He knows that is not really why they bend. Ice storms are: he describes, in vivid detail, how ice loads the branches, then cracks and shatters in the sun, leaving the trees permanently bowed.
Still, he prefers his own version, and tells it anyway: a country boy, alone, learning to climb each tree to the top and fling himself outward and down. The speaker was once that boy, and now, worn out by adult life, he dreams of going back. He would like to climb toward heaven and then be set gently down again, because for all his longing to get away, earth is still the right place for love.
Background
Frost wrote Birches around 1913 to 1914 while living in England, drawing on memories of his New England boyhood, when swinging birch trees was a real country pastime. He first published it in the August 1915 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, in a group that also included The Road Not Taken, and then collected it in his third book, Mountain Interval, in 1916.
He originally called it Swinging Birches, a plainer title closer to the boy’s game at its center. By the time it reached print, the poem had grown into something larger: not just a memory of play but a meditation on imagination, escape, and the pull back to ordinary life.
Analysis and Themes
The poem keeps swinging between two things: what is true, and what the speaker would rather believe. Out of that small tension Frost builds a larger argument about imagination, about the wish to escape, and about why he keeps choosing the earth anyway.
Fact Versus the Story He Prefers
The speaker knows perfectly well that ice storms bend the birches, and he gives that explanation its full due in some of the poem’s most dazzling lines. But then “Truth broke in / With all her matter-of-fact,” and he treats fact as an interruption, something that breaks in on the better story he was telling.
So he goes back to his preferred fiction of the boy. The poem is honest about this: it does not pretend the boy is real. Imagination here does not deny the facts, it simply chooses a more humane and pleasing version to live with, and Frost treats that choice as something the mind is entitled to.
The Boy and the Art of Poise
The imagined boy is a study in control. He “subdued his father’s trees” one by one, and learned the discipline of the game: “not launching out too soon,” keeping “his poise / To the top branches,” climbing as carefully as you would fill a cup “to the brim, and even above the brim.”
It is hard not to read this as a figure for the poet’s own art. The boy rises with patience and balance, then flings outward at exactly the right moment. That blend of restraint and release, of climbing carefully before letting go, is as good a description of how Frost writes as of how a boy swings a birch.
Getting Away, and Coming Back
In the final movement the grown speaker admits why the memory matters. When he is “weary of considerations” and life feels “like a pathless wood” that scratches and stings, he wants to “get away from earth awhile / And then come back to it and begin over.” The escape is meant to be temporary.
That qualification is the heart of the poem. He fears a fate that would “half grant” the wish and not return him, and he stops himself: “Earth’s the right place for love.” The ideal is not transcendence but the round trip, climbing toward heaven only so far as the tree will bear before it “dipped its top and set me down again.” Good both going and coming back.
Form and Technique
The poem is fifty-nine lines of blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter, set as one unbroken paragraph. The long, flexible line is built for a voice thinking aloud, and it lets Frost move fluidly between sharp description, memory, and reflection without the seams showing. Self-interruptions like “But I was going to say” keep it sounding like real speech.
It is also a showcase for what Frost called the “sound of sense,” the way the noise of the words enacts their meaning. Listen to the clustered consonants of “Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust”: the line cracks and tumbles the way the ice does. Elsewhere the syntax bends across line endings and recovers, so the verse itself seems to sway and right itself like the trees it describes.
Notable Lines
A few moments hold the poem’s sound and its quiet philosophy.
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—
Lines 11–13
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
Earth’s the right place for love:
Lines 52–53
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
Line 59
Glossary
A few words that may slow a first reading.
- crazes (line 9): forms a network of fine cracks, the way the glaze on old pottery does; here it is the icy coating that crazes.
- enamel (line 9): a hard, glassy coating. Frost likens the ice sheathing the branches to a layer of enamel.
- bracken (line 14): coarse ferns. The bowed trees are dragged down to the “withered bracken,” the dead ferns on the winter ground.
- considerations (line 43): cares and worries, the weighing-up of things; the adult preoccupations the speaker is weary of.
Related Poems
If this poem stayed with you, these make good companions.
- After Apple-Picking by Robert Frost: A companion meditation where farm labor tips into reverie and a ladder points “toward heaven.”
- Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost: Another lyric that balances the pull to drift away against the claims of ordinary life.
- Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats: The great Romantic poem of longing to escape a weary world, and of being summoned back to it.