Imaginative Freedom of Birches :: Robert Frost Birches Essays

Imaginative Freedom of Birches In Birches (Mountain Interval, 1916) Frost begins to test the power of his redemptory imagination as it moves from its playful phase toward the border of dangerous transcendence. The movement into transcendence is a movement into a realm of radical imaginative freedom where (because redemption has succeeded too well) all possibilities of intimacy with the common realities of experience are dissolved. In its moderation, a redemptive ken motivates union between selves as we curb seen in The Generations of Men, or in any number of Frosts love poems. But in its extreme forms, redemptive consciousness can become self-defeating as it presses the imaginative objet dart into deepest isolation. Birches begins by evoking its core image against the background of a darkly timbered landscape When I see strapes tress to left and right crosswise the lines of straighter darker trees, I wish to think some boys been swinging them. But swinging doesnt bend them down to stay As ice storms do. The pliable, malleable eccentric of the birch tree captures the poets attention and kicks off his meditation. Perhaps young boys dont bend birches down to stay, but swing them they do and thus bend them momentarily. Those straighter, darker trees, like the trees of Into My Own that scarcely show the gentle wind, stand ominously free from serviceman manipulation, menacing in their irresponsiveness to acts of the will. The malleability of the birches is not total, however, and the poet is forced to admit this incident into the presence of his desire, like it or not. The ultimate shape of mature birch trees is the work of objective natural force, not human activity. Yet aft(prenominal) conceding the boundaries of imaginations subjective world, the poet seems not to have constricted himself but to have been released. Often you must have seen them Loaded with ice a prosperous 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 suns warmth makes them shed lechatelierite shells Shattering and avalanching on the snow crust-- Such heaps of broken nut case to sweep away Youd think the inner dome of paradise had fallen. intrigue as he is by the show of loveliness before him, and admiring as be is of nature as it performs the potters art, cracking and crazing the enamel of ice natural covering on the birch trees, it is not finally the thing itself (the ice-coated trees) that interests the poet but the queer association be is tempted to make Youd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.