A description of strength in imagination from a poem by robert frosts birches

By David In Uncategorized There are few trees so beautiful in the snow of winter as the birch, with its paper-white bark highlighted with slashes of black. The American poet Robert Frost wrote a very well-known poem about birches in winter. As usual, I will divide the poem into segments for convenience: The poet, out in the woods in winter, has observed the slender birch trees bending this way and bending that, unlike the straight, upright stance of other trees around them, trees with bark that seems, in winter, much darker than the white, leafless birches.

On "Desert Places" Albert J. Von Frank The poet sees the snow and the night descending together, black and white, working together to muffle sensation and obliterate perception; yet they work against each other, paradoxically, to heighten perception.

The snow works against the night, giving ghastly light whereby to see the darkness, while the fast falling darkness gives urgency to the need to see, for the opportunity will not last long. What the poet sees is truly "for once, then, something.

He knows it is a field because, for the moment, positive signs of its identity remain: Like the snow and the night, the weeds and stubble set up crosscurrents of meaning. What the snow smothers, in addition to everything else, is the vital conflict which the juxtaposition of "weeds and stubble" suggests.

Remove the signs of man's involvement, and it straightway ceases to be "for once, then, something" and can only be identified negatively: This annihilation is figured as death, the ultimate weight of which in cosmic fashion smothers all life, leaving the poet alone in a dead universe, touched, himself, by the death that smothers.

Confronted with the deadness, the spiritlessness, of the external world, the poet notes that he, too, is "absent-spirited"; he, too, is "included" in the loneliness, which is to say the separateness, of the universe of material objects.

This sense is akin to if not identical with Emerson's discovery, made "too late to be helped. For Frost thus far in the poem the persona exists negatively, just as the field may be said to exist negatively.

More specifically, the field no longer a field, properly speaking is known as the emptiness which disturbs the continuity of the woods; similarly, the poet-observer is defined by his absent-spiritedness and thus by his isolation.

The analogy between the condition of nature and the condition of personal psychology is a romantic concept and one perfectly in accord with the ideas of Emerson or Wordsworth. In "Desert Places," however, the implications of the analogy are necessarily and entirely reversed since what is analogous in the persona and the field is the quality of discontinuity.

For Wordsworth, and for many subsequent romantic writers including Emerson, the analogy between states of mind or dispositions of the spirit and the sympathetic universe was uplifting because it implied, or rather presupposed, an active positive alliance, a radical continuity, through God, between man and nature.

Nature lives and spiritually supports us, even though it is composed in large measure of inanimate objects, because we live and God has allowed us to invest it with our lives. Frost appears, in the first three stanzas, to have reversed these implications. The analogy between man and nature appears operative, but the reciprocal relation is negative rather than positive; pluralistic rather than monistic; fragmented in its stress on aloneness rather than unified; deadly rather than life-supporting.

III The third stanza appears at first the weakest on several counts. The purpose it serves seems primarily mechanical. It is necessary to shift the focus from the poet himself back to the scene before him in preparation for the final statement in the last stanza. Presumably the quondam field will become lonelier or less expressive than earlier because the snow is now deep enough to hide not only the "weeds and stubble showing last," but also the very contours of the land.

Since the annihilation of the identity of the field was earlier accomplished when all signs of its use, its pragmatic definition, were covered, this added touch may strike the reader as gratuitous or insignificant by comparison.

The stanza does, of course, accomplish an intensification of mood, though again almost in spite of itself. The gentle hint of "ere it will be less" must be rejected if these lines are to be read as a genuine concentration of despair.Dec 27,  · There are few trees so beautiful in the snow of winter as the birch, with its paper-white bark highlighted with slashes of black.

The American poet Robert Frost wrote a very well-known poem about birches in winter. Judith Oster. This later poem makes a fitting companion piece to "Stopping by Woods." Even the rhyme scheme (aaba) is the same, although in this poem, the poet has not chosen to commit himself to the greater difficulty of linking his stanzas by means of rhyme.

English Semester 2 Exam Review. (From Robert Frosts "Birches") is not between what the speaker says and what the speaker means but between what the speaker says and what the poem means. Dramatic Irony Example. In a horror movie, suspense is often built up by the use of spooky music.

The viewers often know that someone is going to die or. Robert Frost "IT GOES ON" Collection by SDS.

Robert Frost Frost, Robert (Vol. 9) - Essay - lausannecongress2018.com

Poetry and quotes by Robert Frost. ️. March 26, - Jan. 29, From Robert Frosts poem stopping by woods on a snowy evening. Frost is pretty easily interpreted but the words still flow nicely Excerpt from my all-time favorite poem, "Birches" by .

Nuture in Robert Frost’s Poetry of the poetry are skin-deep. If his poetry is analyzed in depth, one will find that his poetry are not the simple description of nature and the rural life, but contain rich meaning in terms of the relationship between man and nature, between man and the real world, between man and man.

commodities. But. is and in to a was not you i of it the be he his but for are this that by on at they with which she or from had we will have an what been one if would who has her.