The boy's fancied playfulness substitutes for unavailable companionship, making for a thoughtful communion with nature, which rather than teach him wisdom allows him to learn it. Frost's speaker then self-consciously breaks from his realistic but metaphorically fantasied digression to say he would prefer to have some boy bend the birches, which action becomes a symbol for controlled experience, as contrasted with the genial fatality of ice storms. The fallen "inner dome of heaven" alludes to Shelley's "dome of many colored glass" to suggest the shattering of the ideal into everyday reality. Ice shells suggest radiating light and color, and the trees bowed to the level of the bracken, suggest suffering, which is immediately lightened by the strange image of girls leaning their hair toward the sun as if in happy submission. Then, almost a third of the poem describes how ice storms bend these trees permanently, unlike the action of boys this scene combines images of beauty and of distortion. The birches bent "across the lines of straighter darker trees" subtly introduce the theme of imagination and will opposing darker realities. The poem moves back and forth between two visual perspectives: birch trees as bent by boys' playful swinging and by ice storms, the thematic interweaving being somewhat puzzling. Its vividness and genial, bittersweet speculation help make it one of Frost's most popular poems, and because its shifts of metaphor and tone invite varying interpretation it has also received much critical discussion. Critical Analysis of Robert Frost's "Birches" "Birches" (“Mountain Interval”, 1916) does not center on a regularly encountered and revealing natural scene rather, it effectively builds a mosaic of thoughts from fragments of memory and fantasy.
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