I haven't pulled any punches with this sample. This is the reading I would offer for Robert Frost's "Birches" (on page 1107 of your text) if I were writing a paper on the poem. I would spend a good deal more time polishing such a piece than I have spent with this sample, but other than the occasional rough spot in the writing you may take it that this is what I am looking for in terms of interpretation, content, and writing style.
I might also note that there are other directions, consistent with the interpretation below, I could have taken in my analysis. I might have played more explicitly with the reincarnation theme that I suggest the poem strongly hints at. I might have emphasized the aloneness found in the poem more strongly, focusing entirely on the irony of making a claim about love in a poem so berift of human interaction. I could have probed more deeply into any of the several symbols I've alluded to. Any of those directions work, so long as the result is a coherent paper offering a valid interpretation. (The sample, you will note, is formatted in accord with html conventions, not MLA requirements. As you are aware, your papers must follow the MLA stylesheet.)
Earth’s the Right Place for Love
Robert Frost is often misread as a “Currier and Ives” poet, a verbal painter of pretty scenes with his focus on rural New England. His poems are much more than pretty pictures, and Frost himself speaks often about the symbolic meanings and underlying elements present in his poetry. Some of his pieces are sorrowful, pictures of characters who are emotionally estranged from life. Even his most optimistic poems are tempered by tension, anxiety, and uncertainty. “Birches” is an up-beat piece reflecting the emotions of a narrator who would gladly exchange heaven for a series of earthly lives, all because “Earth’s the right place for love” (52). Yet “Birches” is a lonely piece, as the only human figures present are the narrator and the boy of his imagination, both alone among the trees with no one in sight to share in either the poet’s wonder or the boy’s accomplishments.
The poem begins with a description of birch trees leaning in a New England forest, and a narrator’s wistful dream that they might have been bent down by a boy---a boy who has made a passion of “swinging” birches (3). The narrator later explains how to swing birches, every detail from “not launching out too soon” (33) to flinging “outward, feet first, with a swish” (39). He even offers an imaginary boy, one who is “too far from town to learn baseball”(26) to swing the birches. Is the boy lonely? Is his life so narrow that he can find no entertainment but swinging birches? Is this an empty obsession and a hollow pleasure, even as he “subdue..[s] [all]… his father’s trees” (28)? Our poet does not seem to think so.
He no more allows such emotions to intrude on the life of his fantasy boy than he allows reality into his poem earlier, in the segment where he claims, not quite accurately, that “Truth broke in” (21). Yes, there were ice storms, and it was ice storms and not a boy that bent the birches (5-16). Our narrator admits that much. But the poet’s ice storms are not cold and dismal. The storms are followed by sunny mornings, with the sun turning the trees’ icy coating to crystal prisms and the poet talking about the ice clicking on the breeze and then falling to earth as broken glass (16), at first suggesting waste and ruin, but then becoming the fallen inner dome of heaven (17), a vision more of magic than of loss. For the birches, dragged and bent by the load of ice (14), we may think of them as figures wearied by the loads life has placed on them, but our poet does not. He speaks of them as young girls drying their hair in the sun (16-20), an image of youth and scarcely veiled eroticism.
In the real world, there are times when “life is too much like a pathless wood” (44) and when “…one eye is weeping / From a twig’s having lashed across it open”(46-47), but these times no more dampen our narrator’s dreams than does the “Truth” of the ice storms or the loneliness of the boy he describes. Indeed, he wishes to “get away from earth awhile” (48), but only for a while. He tempers his request for escape with the vigorous protest that he only wants a moment’s rest from his troubles. He does not want to leave earth and life behind (48-52). He does not want heaven, not yet and not ever.
Instead he wants earth. He wants to be a child again, and to be a swinger of birches. Even more, he wants life to be like a boy’s climb up the birch tree. His desire, almost explicitly stated (54-59), is to repeat the efforts of life (the climb), to enjoy his moment of attainment (having climbed until the tree can bear no more: until there is nothing left of that life), to kick free of life (as he swings down), and to return to the ground (infancy? childhood?) to begin it all again. If each climb up a birch tree is a life, our narrator desires a near infinite number of earthly lives, enough to wear down and “subdue,” through repeated swingings, each and every tree in his father’s (God’s) realm--- that is, to experience every possibility of every life that could be lived. In spite of all the pathless woods (44), cobwebs (45), and dragging loads (14), our narrator wants nothing more than to live again and again, and, like the boy who has subdued all his father’s trees (28), our narrator does not wish to stop until he has run out of lives to live (which will never happen, as it is only ice storms (5) that permanently bend the trees).
Caught up in the image the reader agrees, then notices that the narrator is asserting that “Earth’s the right place for love” (52) in a poem with a pensive narrator, an imaginary boy repeating a lonely evening errand, and the sole suggestion of human interaction in the poem the erotic imagery of the bent trees. Perhaps the narrator considers human interaction a given. Perhaps the narrator considers his expressed love for ice storms and swinging birches to be sufficient substitutes for images of human contact. Or perhaps the love expressed is not the desire for human love, but the love for life itself: for the earth, the ice storms, the birch trees, and maybe even the pathless woods. The argument, like the trip up and down the birch tree, is circular: “one loves earthly life because earthly life is where love is.”
The narrator’s assertion may be good enough to take him “toward Heaven” (56), but only to the top of the tree. From the top of the tree he will inevitably be set back to earth, with nothing to do but begin the cycle again. It seems a matter of faith that such a fate is good enough: “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches” (59). If one has that faith or that sense of the beauty of life, it may be enough. One could do much worse, provided earth really is “the right place for love.”
*****
A note regarding my structure:
As you should note, an outline of this piece will reveal two major points, respectively subdivided into two and three parts. "Three major points" is a handy and effective guide to writing, but not a rule. "Do what allows you to most clearly and completely offer your argument" is a rule.
Structure of the above piece:
I. Introduction, with the last two sentences offering the thesis.
II. The poet's picture of the world, noting the ambivalence of all the patterns
of images:
.....A. A boy, alone, swinging birches
.....B. Ice storms bending the trees
.....C. Times when life is "too much like a pathless wood"
III. The narrator's desire for life
.....A. The narrator's desire to repeat the cycle, seemingly endlessly
.....B. His reasoning: that earth is the "right place for love"
IV. Conclusion, noting the dissonance between the "message" and the
reality pictured.