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So was I once myself a swinger of birches.And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed it open.
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
I, too, was once a swinger of birches. And now I dream of now going back to be.
These are my favorite words from Robert Frost’s “Birches,” one of his favorite poems, and some of the most famous lines from that poem. Robert Frost wrote the poem in his third published book of poetry, Mountain Interval. “Birches” is a poem that is loosely about balance, literally about a game often played in rural New England about children swinging birches.
Swinging birches isn’t an act of going up and down, but of going back and forth. And the last two lines that “I’d like to get away from earth awhile/ And then come back to it and begin over,” are indications of going back and forth, between a dream and between the reality of life. Life, as the narrator describes, is often painful and directionless…
