“But I was going to say when Truth broke in"

Birches

Robert Frost’s poem “Birches” is all about the relationship between the author’s external and internal experience of the world. It is about the complicated relationship between the imagined and the real. It is about a painful objectivity and a preferred subjectivity.

He starts the poem with an objective look at trees that have been bent over by a New England ice storm. Almost as soon as he sees the destruction that the ice has caused a row of birch trees, he leaps into an imagined world where they have not been destroyed. A boy has simply been playing on them.

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.

Reality quickly yanks his imaginative subjective preferred way of seeing – like a puppy yanks back by its leash.  

“But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay
As ice-storms do.”

He knows that there is a stark difference between what has happened and what he would prefer had happened. He starts reflecting with the reader on that objective world again.

“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.”

As he surveys the icy wreckage, it makes him think that maybe the crystal spheres of heaven have fallen and shatters. This is a reference to the Ptlomeic universe, a construct of what the universe was like that held sway until Galileo. It was a fanciful but comforting notion that the earth was the center of the universe and that there were a series of concentric glass spheres surrounding the earth that contained in them the various heavenly bodies. One can imagine all humanity pretending that this was so until Galileo’s telescope and Copernicus’ math gave everyone a rude awakening. “Sorry humans. You are not the center of the universe.”

Again, Frost pulls himself back from the protective comforts of the imagined for in reality, the icy mess is not the shattered glass of crystal heavily spheres. It is, in truth, actually real trees that have been destroyed.  

“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:”

The reality is that these trees will never recover from what has just happened to them. Frost (how ironic that has a name like that) returns to the unblinking objective landscape of destroyed trees but once again, his imagination overwhelms what is” with “what might be.”

“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.”

The imagination replaces the reality whenever and as soon as it can.

The next line and contrived memory is central to the poem. It tells us exactly what the poet would prefer the story of the bent trees to be and you will notice just how long he will linger on his story of the boy, fending off that nasty abrasive, abusive, thing he labels “Truth” with a capital “T.”    

“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.”

In other words, he has replaced the ice storm with a pleasant childhood memory and a hopeful imagined future.

“So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.”

He is like a swinger of birches himself he realizes, going back and forth between his imaginative view and his earthly view. His reality and his subjectivity arm wrestling for control of his emotional state. What he sees, winning out for a time, What he dreams returning with a vengeance to replace what he sees with what he wants to see.

“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.”

This is the struggle for Frost. Too much painful reality. He just cannot handle it sometimes. Reality is just too painful and difficult. He wants to get away from it. To take a vacation from it. He just wants to pretend that it is not what it is.

But one notes that it is not his wish to leave the world entirely. If he did we suppose, he might kill himself, or take to drink, or buy a TV set.

“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.”

He does not want to leave the world because even though it is a place where one gets lost and gets his or her eyeballs scratched, it is, along with being a painful place, a place where love is. It is, he suspects, better than a loveless painless place. And so, he concludes the poem by asserting that the best life is the life that allows people to oscillate between the reality and the fantasy. That allows people to survive the hard realities with retreats into art, fantasy, poetry, and the pretend.

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.”

This living in two worlds may not be ideal, but it will always be better than the one or the other alone.

Question for Comment: What fantasy do you use to cope with reality when reality comes up short or is outright painful? Computer games? TV series? Artistic endeavors? Travel? Novels? Role playing games? Etc.?