Themes
The poem centers on various themes of balance, youth, spirituality, and natural world. The poem deals with the issue of how to reconcile between impulse and carefulness, between spontaneity and structure. This act of balancing remains a crucial theme in Frost’s thought, and Frost’s typical suggestion to this is to execute things in a way that requires control and skill – be it a question of climbing and swinging a Birch tree or an act of writing or any other issue of real-life. The themes can be grouped as follow
Nature
The poet places so much importance on nature. He focuses on the dramatic struggles that occur within the natural world, such as the conflict of the changing of seasons. He presents the natural world as one that inspires deep metaphysical thought in the individuals that are exposed to it.
Rationality and Imagination
In ‘Birches’, the narrator wishes that he could climb a birch tree as he did in his childhood and leave the rational world behind, if only for a moment. This ability to escape rationality and indulge in the liberation of imaginationis limited to the years of childhood.
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