Question

KAT
SET-2
How does 'Birches' imbibe the experience of balancing the opposites in
life ?​

Answer 1

Explanation:

The important thing for the interpreter is to attune her reading to the elements of the poem that may suggest other meanings. One such crucial element is the aforementioned swinging motion between opposites. Notice the contrast between Truth and what the speaker prefers to imagine happened to the birch trees. But also note that Truth, as the speaker relates it, is highly figurative and imaginative: Ice storms are described in terms of the “inner dome of heaven,” and bent trees as girls drying their hair in the sun. This sort of truth calls into question whether the speaker believes there is, in fact, a capital-T Truth.

The language of the poem—the vocabulary and rhythms—is very conversational and, in parts, gently humorous: “But I was going to say when Truth broke in / With all her matter of fact about the ice storm.” But the folksiness does not come at the cost of accuracy or power; the description of the post-ice storm birch trees is vivid and evocative. Nor is this poem isolated, with its demotic vocabulary, from the pillars of poetic tradition. The “pathless wood” in line 44 enters into a dialogue with the whole body of Frost’s work—a dialogue that goes back to the opening lines of Dante’s Inferno. And compare line 13 with these well-known lines from Shelley’s elegy for Keats, “Adonais”: “Life, like a dome of many colour’d glass, / Stains the white radiance of Eternity, / Until death tramples it to fragments.” In “Birches,” the pieces of heaven shattered and sprinkled on the ground present another comparison between the imaginative and the concrete, a description of Truth that undermines itself by invoking an overthrown, now poetic scheme of celestial construction (heavenly spheres). Shelley’s stanza continues: “Die, / If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek.” Frost’s speaker wants to climb toward heaven but then dip back down to earth—not to reach what he seeks but to seek and then swing back into the orbit of the world.