Imaginative Freedom of Birches :: Robert Frost Birches Essays

Imaginative Freedom of Birches In Birches (Mountain Interval, 1916) Frost begins to try out the power of his redeeming(a) imagination as it moves from its playful phase toward the edge of dangerous transcendence. The movement into transcendence is a movement into a ground of radical imaginative freedom where (because redemption has succeeded too well) all possibilities of exercise with the common realities of experience are dissolved. In its moderation, a redemptive reason motivates union between selves as we acquit 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 manhood into deepest isolation. Birches begins by evoking its core image against the background of a darkly overgrown landscape When I see lashes incline to left and right crosswise the lines of straighter darker trees, I comparable to think some boys been hesitation them. But swing ing doesnt bend them down to stay As ice storms do. The pliable, malleable caliber 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 show the shot, stand ominously free from valet de chambre 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 position into the presence of his desire, like it or not. The ultimate shape of mature birch trees is the work of objective natural force, not human activity. Yet aft(prenominal) conceding the boundaries of imaginations subjective world, the poet seems not to have constricted himself but to have been released. Often you must have seen them Loaded with ice a rejoicing 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 suns warmth makes them shed vitreous silica shells Shattering and avalanching on the snow crust-- Such heaps of broken spyglass to sweep away Youd think the inner dome of promised land had fallen. fascinate 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 ending on the birch trees, it is not finally the thing itself (the ice-coated trees) that interests the poet but the oddish association be is tempted to make Youd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.