Hello readers! I am going to write this blog as a part of a thinking activity assigned by Megha ma'am, department of English MKBU. In this blog I am going to write about Robot Frost and a short discussion of his famous poems' Tree at My Window' and 'Birches'.
Born: March 26, 1874
Died: January 29, 1963
Occupation: Poet, playwright
Notable Awards: Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Congressional Gold Medal
Famous Poems:
- 'The Road Not Taken'
- 'Birches'
- 'Fire and Ice'
- 'Mending Wall'
- 'Home Burial'
- 'The Death of the Hired Man'
- 'Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening'
- 'Acquainted with the Night'
- 'Out, Out'
- 'Nothing Gold Can Stay'
Robert Lee Frost was an American poet who was much admired for his depictions of the rural life of New England, his command of American colloquial speech, and his realistic verse portraying ordinary people in everyday situations. Robert Frost was born on March 26, 1874, in San Francisco, where his father, William Prescott Frost, Jr., and his mother, Isabelle Moodie, had moved from Pennsylvania shortly after marrying. He became interested in reading and writing poetry during his high school years in Lawrence, enrolled at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire in 1892 and, later, at Harvard University, though he never earned a formal degree. Frost drifted through a string of occupations after leaving school, working as a teacher, cobbler, and editor of the Lawrence Sentinel. His first published poem, “My Butterfly,” appeared on November 8, 1894 in the New York newspaper The Independent. On January 29, 1963, Frost died from complications related to prostate surgery. His ashes are interred in a family plot in Bennington, Vermont.
Frost was well-received by the literary world. In 1916, he published Frost's Mountain Interval, a collection of other works that he created while in England, including a tribute to Thomas. Frost met fellow poets Ezra Pound and Edward Thomas, two men who would affect his life in significant ways. Pound and Thomas were the first to review his work in a favorable light, as well as provide significant encouragement. Frost credited Thomas's long walks over the English landscape as the inspiration for one of his most famous poems, 'The Road Not Taken'.
In 1894, Frost had his first poem, "My Butterfly: an Elegy," published in The Independent, a weekly literary journal based in New York City. Two poems, "The Tuft of Flowers" and "The Trial by Existence," were published in 1906. In 1912, Frost and Elinor decided to sell the farm in New Hampshire and move the family to England, where they hoped there would be more publishers willing to take a chance on new poets.
Pulitzer Prizes and Awards:
During his lifetime, Frost received more than 40 honorary degrees. In 1924, Frost was awarded his first of four Pulitzer Prizes, for his book New Hampshire. He would subsequently win Pulitzers for Collected Poems (1931), A Further Range (1937) and A Witness Tree (1943). In 1960, Congress awarded Frost the Congressional Gold Medal. In this blog I am going to write analysis of two famous poems by Robert Frost.
Tree at My Window:
Tree at my window, window tree,
My sash is lowered when night comes on;
But let there never be curtain drawn
Between you and me.
Vague dream head lifted out of the ground,
And thing next most diffuse to cloud,
Not all your light tongues talking aloud Could be profound.
But tree, I have seen you taken and tossed,
And if you have seen me when I slept,
You have seen me when I was taken and swept And all but lost.
That day she put our heads together,
Fate had her imagination about her,
Your head so much concerned with outer, Mine with inner, weather.
Analysis:
Tree At My Window by Robert Frost is one of the well-known nature poems in the collection entitled West Running Brook, which was published in 1928. Frost is a great nature-poet but he is a nature-poet in his own right. He is not a follower of Wordsworth or other glow-worms in the romantic school. On the contrary, he is quite opposed to the Wordsworthian way of thinking about nature. Just next to the window of the poet's bedroom is a tree. At night the poet closes the window to shut out the cold. But the poet avoids drawing the curtain because he wants to have the tree constantly within the range of his vision. The poet is fascinated by the tree - he seems to have discovered bounds of affinity between himself and the tree. He sees the tree come under violent spells of movement because of the strong winds.
In the first stanza of ‘Tree at My Window’, Frost begins by addressing the tree in tautological terms which almost recall a child’s song: ‘Tree at my window, window tree’. The last two lines add nothing to the meaning of the first four, but they set the blithe, relaxed tone that dominates the whole poem. In the second stanza, Frost continues to address the tree at his window as a ‘dream-head’ that rises out of the ground, its branches and leaves as ‘diffuse’, almost, as the wisps of a cloud.
In the third stanza, we get a ‘turn’ of sorts, announced by that word ‘But’. There is some kinship between man and tree, between poet and nature: just as Frost has seen the tree ‘taken and tossed’ in the wind or in a storm, so the tree has ‘seen’ Frost tossing and turning as he sleeps at night. The final stanza sees Frost confirming this idea of his ‘window tree’ as a kindred spirit, with the tree concerned with ‘outer’ and Frost with ‘inner, weather’. This gives the impression of a casual, natural approach: although the poem is carefully structured, much as the window in the house in which Frost sits and writes was built according to a plan. Given the focus on the poet’s own inner mind in the final line of the poem, Frost probably also wants us to call to mind the idiom about ‘having one’s head in the clouds’, specially as we get ‘dream-head’ followed by 'cloud'.
'Tree at My Window’ is written in quatrains, rhymed abba. However, note how Frost doesn’t rigidly stick to full ‘rhyme’ throughout: in the first stanza, we get pararhyme, in the second we get full rhymes but some overlap between the a and b rhymes, and in the final stanza we get rhyme that spans multiple words.
Conclusion:
Whenever Frost speaks to nature or of nature, we feel that he always has man in his mind - that he is looking at man from the corner of his eye and ultimately talking to man. Even in these poems, it seems that Frost describes the animal and vegetable nature in man and not attributing human nature to the animal and vegetable worlds, like the Romantics. Frost gives utmost importance to man.
Birches:
CLICK HERE FOR READING THE POEM
The poem ‘Birches’ is one of Robert Frost’s most widely anthologised and studied poems. 'Birches' was first published in 1915. The poem was a part of a collection titled Mountain Interval. 'Birches' draws on Robert Frost’s childhood memories of swinging on birch trees as a boy. The poem revolves around the themes of the nature of Truth, the relation between fact and fiction, revisiting one’s childhood and the balance between life and art which must be maintained for a meaningful life.
The poem begins like the poet is in a candid conversation. He describes that seeing birches bending to left and right makes him think of some boy who swings in them. The poet sees birches bending to left and right in the backdrop of “straighter and darker ” trees; he likes to believe it is the work of some country boy who must’ve indulged in swinging them. He knows it isn’t the work of a harmless boy. It’s the ice storms. Harsh, cold and ruthless. The boy and the ice storm both are explanations for the truth behind the state of the bent birches. One is the objective, fact based explanation which states that which is. The other is a subjective explanation based on fantasy which creates a possibility of that which can be.
The poet minutely observes how the rising breeze cracks the glazed surface made over the birches by snow. They look like heaps of broken glass and their sharp sound of crashing makes one think as if the inner dome of heaven has fallen. A load of fallen ice on them brings them down to the withered bracken, a kind of fern growing on the ground. They remain bowed for so long without straightening themselves once. The speaker uses simple metaphorical imagery to illustrate the desire to escape life as it is. However, the idea of climbing a tree only to be set back down on the ground after reaching the top is also a metaphor for the desire to get away from the speaker’s own current existence while also knowing that this escape will not be permanent.
So, such a wish to get away for a while from the earth and come down to it is very similar to climbing on a birch tree whose snow-white trunk feels like climbing toward heaven. When the tree can’t bear him anymore, It feels very good to go up and come back again. It is the best alternative the poet can put forward in the face of life’s hardships and he says that one could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
Themes:
The Conflict Between Fantasy and Reality:
In the speaker’s stream of consciousness, two voices diverge and chatter along in a parallel tension. The first voice is that of fantasy; it longs for the woodland birches to stand as symbols of personal meaning. It assumes the birch trees were bent by a boy at play. The second voice is that of reality; it understands the “Truth” that the birches were bent by a storm and that any illusions otherwise are an indulgence.
The Power of Memory:
The speaker’s memories of childhood create a deeper layer of events and meanings in the narrative of the poem. The poet is immediately reminded of his own childhood days spent swinging upon and bending birch trees. Because those childhood memories are so laced with bliss, the speaker, now laden with the responsibilities and difficulties of adult life, sees in his past the image of heaven. Looking at the birch trees afresh, he wonders whether such heaven remains available to him.
Nostalgia:
The theme of nostalgia is strong in this poem. After seeing the birch trees bending down, the poet “likes to think” that it has been the mischief of some rural New England boys with whom it has been the custom to play with the trees in their recreational periods. The poet too has been extremely fond of this in his own childhood. In the later section of the poem, the poet expresses his desire to go back once again to his childhood to enjoy these little, silly pleasures.
'Birches’ is written in blank verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter. This means that there are ten syllables per line, with the syllables arranged into five metrical feet. Frost was fond of using blank verse in his poetry: since it is close to the rhythms of regular human speech in the English language, it reflects his homespun, colloquial style. In the poem the poet uses a comparative degree which we can see throughout the poem.
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