Imaginative Freedom of Birches :: Robert Frost Birches Essays

Imaginative Freedom of Birches In Birches (Mountain Interval, 1916) Frost begins to probe the power of his redemptive imagination as it moves from its playful phase toward the brink of dangerous transcendence. The movement into transcendence is a movement into a realm of radical imaginative freedom where (because redemption has succeeded to a fault well) all possibilities of engagement with the common realities of experience are dissolved. In its moderation, a redemptive consciousness motivates union between selves as we have 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 while into deepest isolation. Birches begins by evoking its core image against the background of a darkly wooded landscape When I see birches bend to left and right Across the lines of straighter darker maneuvers, I like to think some boys been swinging them. But swinging doesnt be nd them down to stay As ice storms do. The pliable, malleable quality 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 manifest the breeze, stand ominously free from human 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 fact into the presence of his desire, like it or not. The crowning(prenominal) shape of mature birch trees is the work of objective natural force, not human activity. Yet after conceding the boundaries of imaginations subjective world, the poet seems not to have constrict himself but to have been released. 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 m any-colored As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel. Soon the suns warmth makes them shed crystal shells Shattering and avalanching on the snow crust-- Such heaps of broken looking glass to sweep away Youd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen. Fascinated 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 coating on the birch trees, it is not finally the thing itself (the ice-coated trees) that interests the poet but the strange association be is tempted to make Youd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.