The document is a presentation outline about Robert Frost's poem "Birches". It provides background on Frost, an analysis of the themes in the poem, and a line-by-line summary. The presentation covers Frost's life experiences, the themes of youth, man's relationship with nature, spirituality, and isolation in the poem. It then analyzes each section of the poem in detail, explaining the imagery and storyline about a man who imagines swinging from birch trees as a way to escape the difficulties of adulthood.

2. PRESENTATION
ON POEM
“BIRCHES”
FORM OF POETRY

3. PRESENTED BY:
RABIA NAZ
AHSAN SHAFFIQUE
WAQAS AHMED
KAINAT FATIMA

4. OUTLINE:
 Background Of The Poet
 Theme
 Summary
 Lines 1-9
 Lines 10-16
 Lines 17-22
 Lines 23-32
 Lines 33-40
 Lines 41-47
 Lines 48-59

5. Background Of The
Poet:
 Robert Lee Frost (March 26, 1874 –
January 29, 1963) was an American poet.
His work was initially published in
England before it was published in
America. Known for his realistic
depictions of rural life and his command
of American colloquial speech, Frost
frequently wrote about settings from rural
life in New England in the early
twentieth century, using them to examine
complex social and philosophical themes.

6. Continue:
 Frost was honored frequently during his lifetime,
receiving four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry. He became
one of America's rare "public literary figures, almost
an artistic institution." He was awarded
the Congressional Gold Medal in 1960 for his poetic
works. On July 22, 1961, Frost was named poet
laureate of Vermont.

7. Theme Of Birches:
Youth:
Youth, like death, is a constant backdrop for many of Frost's poems.
The speaker of "Birches" never sees a boy or comes across one. He only
imagines one, and the boy that he does imagine is himself at a younger age.
They are ready for adventures in nature and represent the wild, untamed state
of "man" that remains good and moral even though no one is there to govern
him.
Man And The Natural World:
In "Birches," Frost incorporates ideas from two similar traditions.
The first is the Romantic tradition, poets like Wordsworth, Coleridge, and
Keats often set their characters in Nature. The character (often male) would
embark on adventures or long walks. Sometimes Nature would challenge him

8. Continue:
Spirituality:
Robert Frost is not the kind of poet to insert religious imagery
into his poems. A subtle Christian allusion is rare. However, the poet writes a
lot of meditations on life and death. In "Birches," Frost mentions "heaven"
twice. Notice how it is always with a lower-case h and is more suggestive of
the sky than paradise.
Isolation:
As with much of Frost's poetry, "Birches" creates a mood of
loneliness and isolation. Some factors that contribute to the mood include the
winter weather, which seems to cut the speaker off from other people, and the
speaker's discussion of the boy growing up on an isolated farm. The speaker's
loneliness may be the result of adult concerns and considerations.

9. Summary:
 A man is walking through the woods, looking at the top of the
tree line. He sees some trees swaying in the wind and he starts
to imagine things about the trees. He thinks about how the ice
covering the trees cracks when they bend. Then he thinks
about how heavy ice and snow will bend thin trees to the
ground. This gets him imagining a boy climbing to the top of
trees and bending them down until he can let go and fall safely
to the ground. He remembers doing this when he was a kid and
wishes that when he felt trapped in his adult life he could
climb trees. This memory makes him feel like life isn't a trap,
because his youthful imagination can free him at any moment.

10. Lines 1-3:
 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.
Explanation:
 To begin with, we notice that the speaker is speaking in the first person to an
imaginary audience.
 Birches are trees with slender trunks and bark that peels off like paper. They can
grow up to 50 feet tall.
 Because birches have thin trunks, they bend pretty easily in the wind and under the
weight of snow.
 Also, some types of birches have white bark, so they stand out against "straighter
darker trees."
 When the speaker sees the birch trees bent to the ground, he imagines that a young
boy was "swinging them." We can imagine that a birch would be bent a little after
the swinging.

11. Lines 4-7
 But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay
As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain […]
Explanation:
 From these lines we do that learn that whatever it is, swinging bends the tree down
to the ground. But, swinging doesn't bend the tree enough to cause permanent
damage like an ice-storm can.
 During an ice-storm, the tree is covered with freezing rain. The rain coats the tree in
a sheet of ice that is formed during a cold winter night.
 The speaker expects you to have experienced this first-hand, but if you haven't we
can assure you it is pretty cool to see the sun reflect off the ice.

12. Line 7-9:
 They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel
Explanation:
 Not only does this sight of bending birches look beautiful, but a little wind can
bump the ice-covered branches against each other, causing clicking sounds. Now
we're involving senses besides sight (i.e., hearing).
 This clicking action cracks the ice, but not all the way.
 A "craze" is a poetic way of describing little cracks. They might look like veins or a
small crack in a windshield that resembles a spider web.
 "Enamel" is a glassy outer surface. You might have seen it on pottery, like a hand-
made coffee mug, or you might have heard a dentist talk about tooth enamel. Either
way, when we see the word, "enamel," we think of something that's hard, shiny, and
glossy. In this case, the enamel is the coating of ice.

13. Lines 10-13:
 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
Explanation:
 When the sun gets hotter during the day, the ice covering the trees starts to melt.
 The speaker is using dramatic language to get you into the feeling of experience. He
compares the breaking ice to shattering crystal and glass that falls like an
avalanche.
 The snow is crusty, because the sun has melted the top layer of snow the day before
and the cold night made it freeze hard again.
 The shattered ice collects below the tree as if it were a pile of glass being swept into
a dustpan.
 The idea of a dome also brings to mind the ceilings of some cathedrals and
churches.

14. Lines 14-16:
 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:
Explanation:
 The trees are bent down under the weight of ice and snow until they reach the
shrubs and ferns ( "bracken") on the ground below.
 To the speaker, the birches don't crack or craze like the ice. They bend, rather than
break.
 However, the word "seem" should tip you off that this might not be the case.
 When the trees are bent down for the entirety of a New England winter, they don't
straighten out afterwards. So, in a sense, they're broken.

15. Lines 17-20:
 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.
Explanation:
 The speaker paints us a vivid picture of what these "broken" trees look like when
the snow thaws and their leaves come back.
 The speaker says that the trees look like girls drying their hair in the sun.
 Those of us with short hair may not realize that long hair takes forever to dry. Now
imagine drying hair in the days before hairdryers.
 These country girls that the speaker describes are on their hands and knees, bending
their heads down so that the sun can dry their hair.

16. Lines 21-22:
 But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm,
Explanation:
 We see that the speaker got a little distracted by talking about the image of girls
drying their hair, but now he's back.
 We're not sure what he has come back to. This might just be a poet's way of telling
his audience that he's shifting gears to a new topic.
 Also, whenever the idea of "Truth" enters into a poem, you should be suspicious.
 Here "Truth" is associated with "matter-of-fact" in the sense of real-life
observations about nature or amateur science.
 That "Truth" becomes a part of the discussion should clue you in that the speaker
might be testing the poetic waters for different ideas about facts, values, science,
nature, and spirituality (a.k.a. metaphysics).

17. Lines 23-27:
 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.
Explanation:
 First, we got the country girls, and now we've moved on to the boys.
 The speaker is wishfully imagining that a boy were bending the trees instead of the
wind, ice, and snow.
 He comes up with some details about who our tree-bender might be. He imagines a
boy who herds cows, doesn't know how to play baseball, and doesn't have any
friends.
 The boy lives on an isolated, New England farm and has to work. He has to
entertain himself year round and so he explores his natural world. Maybe he's
training to become the next Robert Frost.

18. Lines 28-32:
 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 […]
Explanation:
 The speaker imagines the boy going out into his father's land.
 The boy "rides" the birch trees down, meaning that the boy climbs to the top of
them until his weight bends the trees down to the ground.
 Remember this is what the speaker wishes was bending the trees instead of the
snow and ice.
 The boy does this so many times on his father's land that the trees lose their
stiffness and bend towards the ground.
 One way to interpret line 32 is to see it as an example of man conquering nature.

19. Lines 32-35:
 […] He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground […]
Explanation:
 The boy starts to get better about swinging the trees over time.
 He learns to get all the way to the top of the tree and not bend it too soon, before
he's reached the top.
 If he did jump out too soon, the tree would be damaged.
 If you're a science person, think of this as a Physics lesson combined with a
Biology lesson: the tree is a flexible lever; the roots are the fulcrum; the boy is the
load.

20. Lines 35-38:
 […] 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.
Explanation:
 Now we're getting some details of how the boy becomes better at swinging the
trees.
 He keeps "his poise," meaning he stays balanced and calm, sort of hovering up on a
tree branch.
 The speaker compares it to filling a cup to the brim. If you are pouring liquid into a
cup, you are so careful not to overflow the cup, so you add a small amount of the
liquid at a time. Then you add just a teeny bit more and the liquid forms a dome just
above the rim of the cup.

21. Lines 41-42:
 So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
Explanation:
 Here we have another transition. The speaker shifts gears from a young boy he
imagines swinging on a birch tree, to himself as an older man.
 He seems to reflect on how he isn't young anymore.
 Apparently the speaker can imagine this boy swinging trees in such great detail
because he was once that little boy.
 He wishes he were out there swinging trees like he was a boy again.
 So all these details could be memories from his boyhood: conquering nature, girls
sunning themselves, time alone to think about the natural world.

22. Lines 43-47:
 It's when I'm dreary 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.
Explanation:
 The speaker wishes he could be a boy again when he's "dreary of considerations."
 "Considerations" could mean thoughtful decision making – an important adult
activity.
 Next the speaker compares life to "a pathless wood," meaning it's easy to get lost
when there are no directions provided.
 Lines 45-47 give the details of what happens when you walk through a pathless
wood. You get sharp branches and spider webs in your face. These are all
metaphors for the slings and arrows of life.

23. Lines 48-49:
 I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
Explanation:
 The speaker transitions to the idea that going back to his childhood is an escape. He
wants to take a vacation from life.
 Whether it's a vacation from adult life with responsibilities or a vacation from the
world of the living, we don't know.
 The idea to take away is that he wants a new beginning. He still enjoys life's
pleasures, and he doesn't want to die. But he doesn't want to be where he is now.

24. Lines 50-53:
 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.
Explanation:
 The speaker seems to make the following disclaimer: "If any deity, higher power,
etc. heard me wish for a break from life, please don't take away my life without
ensuring the safe return after an agreed upon time."
 Just in case his dreary outlook on life is a phase, the speaker says to himself that he
has no desire to make his vacation from life permanent.
 His reason is that he is a lover of life. Anyone who appreciates the sway of trees in
the chilling wind loves life.
 For the speaker, love is a worldly idea.
 "It's" (meaning love) worldly to him, because the world is all he knows.
 He recognizes that the world you know is better than an imagined one.

25. Lines 54-57:
 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.
Explanation:
 This appreciation of life doesn't mean he isn't curious. The speaker still wonders
about the limits of life and tests out where life ends and heaven begins.
 Line 54 has a funny wording that needs to be pointed out: "I'd like to go by…"
Usually people talk like this about their own death: "I'd like to go in my sleep." So
it seems like the speaker is saying that he'd like to go to heaven by climbing a tree.
 However in line 56 he says "Towards heaven," so he doesn't actually want to
get to heaven just yet.
 Instead the speaker wants a peek at heaven from the top of the tree, then gently
return to his normal life.

26. Lines 58-59:
 That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
Explanation:
 The speaker is pleased with this resolution. He likes the idea of a vacation from the
troubles of life, as long as it is only vacation and not a permanent situation.
 The glimpse at the world from a new perspective would be rejuvenating.
 He concludes, like he did in lines 52 and 53, that life's pleasures (like birch
swinging) are enough to make life worth living.