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My Interpretation of Robert Frost's Poem: Birches

Written by: George Zamalea My first reading was as I was seeking for something pleasant. Having given to myself this warning from my first class attending and listening to my colleagues from their different views, I mounted to my mind this poem would not be easier, and encouraged to myself to have patience. Yet my reading on psychology and social awareness and the weakness of human strength gently pushed me into the sexual glorification and the corporal punishment might have played in the speaker of poem such possibility at home or during his childhood. It was impossible, on account of this figure language, to confirm the first suspicion that the relation was indeed an act of sexual pleasure that was still latent in the speaker’s mind.

I understood here “Birch” is taken meaning of metaphor and the first tempted to trace it with beauty ("summer") and  destruction ("winter", "ice storm") have such an impression of remarkable dimension of life , which dated from other Mr. Frost’s poems such as "Mending Wall", "The Road Not Taken", etc. But it was never possible for them to maintain this position: The connotation of the boy and the watching of the man are reflecting it through his visual memory of the old man. There is the boy is swinging on this birch tree as it taken only a single expression of what we are able to see.  Does he swing between life and the swinging-phantasy as the only options he has in front of his own mixed personality as it was seen by the adult? Throughout the poem on the account of the one-sidedness and again of the content of phantasy came to light: \”Birches bend left and right, \ “Summer or winter \”. It invariably charges with a high degree of pleasure and has its issues in an act of pleasure, self-erotic gratification; it might therefore be expected that the sight of adult’s suppressed emotion:  “get away from earth awhile\ And then come back to it and begin over. \”. It elaborated such illusion of phantasy, and even the whole of impossibility he could not. The declaration was bound to arise of what relation there might be between the importance of swinging left and right sense in which he wanted “come back to it and begin over\”. We know for sure it cannot be possible.

The predisposition to see the unique significance of sexual experiences and childhood can revoke another interpretation toward the figure language of the poem. At the same that I attributed it sexuality this part of swinging  in the pleasure and not by such sexual traumas of childhood because it was impossible to explain the symptoms for the only visual of:\” what he found himself,\ Summer or winter,\ and could play alone.” Not either from that stanza: \”One by one he subdued his father’s trees\ By riding them down over and over again.” The poetical function in the person speaking his behavior is already decisively determined by the way he played baseball. Therefore the theme of Birches can say whether an old momentum and youth's expression of conception could have such beauty of romance within it.

In conclusion,  Mr. Frost used the “Birch” tree as a metaphor.  It was most of youth and old and that created a mixed character of summer and winter and left and right that appears the normality developed as the result of being old and youth which enable me to established simple correlation between strong and carefree and old and subordinated by experience and by life itself.