Nostalgic elements in the poem "Birches".

"Birches", one of the most widely quoted poems by Robert Frost is published in the anthology of poems, "Mountain Interval" in 1916. The poem is strikingly notable for its mixture of fact and fancy, observation and imagination. C. Day Lewis comments that, it is a poem "In which observation and reminiscence, realism and fancy, the light time tone and the serious are perfectly blended; it moves with beautiful assurance from mood to mood, image to image, thought to thought....."



              The poem exemplifies the easy and simple descriptive quality of Robert Frost. The poem describes the swinging of the birches. Although the birches are a common sight in New England, the poet represents it with minute observation and picturesque quality.



              The lyric begins in a tone of easy conversation. The opening lines present a contrast between what the poet would like to believe caused the bending and what in fact did cause it. He would think that some boy has been swinging the birches ----"I like to think some boy's been swinging them." But soon the truth dawns upon him, he realises that swinging cannot bend them permanently and agrees ----"Ice - storms do that." Then the poet again says that though he knows the "matter of fact", he should prefer to think that "some boy bend them."



              In spite of being aware of the fact, the poet again and again says that some boy has been swinging the birches and bend them. Actually, when he sees the swinging-birches, he becomes nostalgic, because as a boy, once the poet also used to swing the birches as he himself states, "So was I once myself a swinger of birches." Here either the poet becomes nostalgic when he describes the boy, or the boy is the projection of the poet's own childhood.



              The poet is not only thinking about his past, but he also dreams that he would take to birch-swinging once again --- "And so I dream of going back to be" ---- sometime in the future when he is "weary of considerations". Like Keats in "Ode to a Nightingale" and Shelley in "To a Skylark", he wants to leave this harsh, rude realistic world. But unlike them he also wants to "come back to it and begin over" because according to Frost, "Earth's the right place for love."



              When the poet describes the boy's exparties in swinging, it seems like the poet knows the boy for a very long time. It also suggests the poet's connection with that boy. Here he also recollects his childhood memory ------
       "He learned all there was
      To learn about not lanching out too soon
      And so not carrying the tree away
      Clear to the ground....."



               Though the poet becomes nostalgic about the past, he does not forget the reality as he describes life as a "pathledd 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."



               In becoming nostalgic or in recollecting past memory, we find a similarity between Robert Frost and the British Romantic poet Wordsworth. Wordsworth in "Tintern Abbey" wishes to go back to his past ----- " Once again/ Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs...... I again repose/ Here, under this dark sycamore....." etc. In "Immortality Ode", Wordsworth also becomes nostalgic about his past ----
    "There was a time when meadow, grove and stream
     The earth and every common sight
      To me did seem
      Aparelled in celestial light
      ........
      The things which I have seen I now can see no more."



               Robert Frost also has a similarity with Dylan Thomas. He in his poem, "Poem in October" romanticizes the past and says ----
    "And I saw the turning so clearly a child's
    Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
    Through the parables
     Of sunlight
      And the legends of the green chapels."



           Robert Frost as a masterly American poet mingles the note of melancholy, nostalgia, imagination, fancy so well that the poem "Birches" becomes one of the most powerful poems by him.