simile life is too much like a pathless wood explanation

Since some of them have a white bark, they are said to stand out against “ the lines of straighter darker trees”, bringing the element of contrast in the poem. The pliable, malleable quality of the birch tree captures the poet’s attention and sets him in a meditative mood. The plosive alliteration of “ birches bend” suggest the movement of these elegant trees as they sway and groan in the wind. Birches have slender trunks and thus bend easily in the wind and under the weight of snow and thus the poet sees them “ bend to left and right”. So it was when the poet sees the birches. The poem begins with an implicit tone of delight-the joy that reels one’s mind when one chances upon something of the past that evokes deep nostalgia, fills one’s mind with pleasant memories and makes one long to relive the bygone times.

In writing this poem, Frost was inspired both by another poem called “ Swinging on a Birch-tree” by an American poet Lucy Lacrom and his childhood experience of swinging on birches, which was a popular game for children in rural areas of New England during the time. Originally, this poem was called “ Swinging Birches”, which provides a more accurate depiction of the subject. Its demotic vocabulary does not isolate it from the pillars of poetic tradition. Written in blank verse following an iambic pentameter structure, it moves from a natural sketch to a fanciful explanation of the bending of the birches. It is at its best when it is a tantalizing vagueness.” And this is exactly what we find in “ Birches”. Frost maintained that a poem “ begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a loneliness.

Birches is a narrative poem written by the American poet Robert Frost and first appeared in the August issue of Atlantic Monthly in 1915 and was later published in 1916 in his third collection of poetry called Mountain Interval.

Simile life is too much like a pathless wood explanation