Robert Frost Poetry

Although I read all of the Robert Frost poems assigned, I will only take the time to explain two of the poems, Birches and Mending Wall.

The first poem I read, Birches, was a tough poem for me to understand. It took me a couple of readings to really get into what I thought Frost was trying to tell me. The word birches can be defined as small to medium sized trees. I looked that up to help get a visual idea of what the poem was describing physically. I also looked up the word bracken, which means a cluster of ferns or a thicket. Roughly the first half of the poem contains vivid imagery of what birches look like, especially when they are bent by either ice or by humans. Frost uses this physical imagery to set up symbolism later on in the poem.

The poem moves on to describing a boy going through the birches, knocking them all down until they are all arched to the ground. Frost then transitions to wishing he could personally go back to swinging birches. Frost likens the swinging of birches to a kind of relief from the world; he thinks of it as taking a break from daily life. The speaker describes that when "life is too much like a pathless wood, where your face burns and tickles with cobwebs broken across it and one eye weeping," he would like to take a break from this world (lines 44-46). Frost cleverly uses climbing a birch tree as a comparison to taking a break from daily troubles. The use of the phrase "snow white trunk" alludes to climbing the birch as a very pure experience, almost heavenly (line 55).

The speaker, however, does not wish to detach himself completely from the earth, he still wants to come back. After he experiences his withdrawal from society by climbing up the birch, the tree will slowly give way and let him back down to life on earth. In doing this Frost is saying that he is taking a break from earth and life, and after some time contentedly comes back to his life.

The second poem, Mending Wall, proved even more difficult for my comprehension. Although no words were extremely difficult, I had trouble getting a lot out of it. I did look up the word elf to find that it probably here means mischievous person, especially a child. Literally speaking, the poem talks about a neighbor and his thoughts on a wall that separates his property from his neighbor's property. He repeats the line, "Something there is that doesn't love a wall" a couple of times, showing that although his neighbor is certainly in support of the wall, others voice contrasting opinions on the matter (line 1).

I can only guess at what Frost was trying to communicate to the reader, but I think it has something to do with how much we open up ourselves to others. The neighbor uses the phrase, good fences make good neighbors many times, expressing many peoples' thoughts on how they believe keeping everything to themselves is the best way to live. The speaker, however, speaks on how he wondered "what [he]was walling in or walling out" when he built the fence (line 34). He wonders what the consequences will be of keeping himself inside of the wall he built and others outside.