Through symbolism and artistic design Robert Frost illustrates the circle of life, death and life again, a kind of reincarnation of the soul in his poem "Birches."" The poem begins with a description of a birch tree under various conditions, symbolic of the numerous hardships experienced by the members of our pretentious society. It then dives into the childhood imagination that we all have and use, to forget about the struggles in life. This poem brilliantly describes how we all suffer from hardships, which cause us to lose faith in our lives and how our innocent imagination can bring us back to show us the love found on earth. .
The first image that Frost describes to his readers is a realistic picture of birch trees being bent from an ice storm. He makes the connection that our lives become weighted with stresses of various kinds, which is symbolic of the ice weighing down the heavy branches of the birch tree. The sun that Frost refers to symbolizes warmth and life and provides the birch tree with relief in the same way that warmth and life aides us to our salvation from stress. We are similar to the birch trees in the respect that after extreme cases of stress we are bent in an entirely new direction and are never quite the same. "And they seem not to brake: though they once bowed so low for so long, they never right themselves."" This is the moment when Robert Frost interrupts himself from the "Truth- of the realistic life that members of our society lead and brings his readers back to simplicity, through the life of a young rural boy. .
The young boy is the second image that Frost is displaying to his readers. This young boy is representative of the child in us all, who finds pleasure in the simplicity of life. All to often society helps us to forget the pleasure found in merely swinging from the branches of a birch tree. We have become so self-absorbed in the comforts and technology of society we no longer experience joy in the simplicity of life like the young naive, rural boy.
