Birches

Robert Frost is one of my favourite poets. I think he’s a favourite poet for a lot of people. A few years back (well, I guess it was a quarter-century ago, because time does fly) the American poet laureate Robert Pinsky ran something called the Favorite Poem Project and Frost had a half dozen poems in the mix, with “The Road Not Taken” being the clear winner among the more than 18,000 entries.

“Birches” isn’t quite as well known, but it’s still popular among what the critic David Orr refers to as Frost’s two audiences: poetry devotees and the great mass of readers. To these two (obviously not mutually exclusive) groups I’d add a third: those versed (as Frost would put it) in country things. This seems obvious to me because I grew up on a farm, close to nature. This was both a good and a bad thing, as Frost himself knew, but more than that it’s also a very rare thing in today’s world. I think something like 5% of the current population of North America grew up on farms. So most people aren’t versed, or at least as versed, in country things.

When I read “Birches” I like what it gets right. Like when, after a storm, the trees are encased in an enamel of ice that melts in the next day’s sun, the “crystal shells / Shattering and avalanching on the snow crust.” Why the snow crust? Because there’d been an ice storm and that means the surface of the snow is a hardened carapace that the broken ice bounces off. Or take the whimsical evocation of “some boy”

As he went out and in to fetch the cows – Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself, Summer or winter, and could play alone.

Damn. That really was me growing up. Even walking out to fetch the cows.

I mention all this only as a way of bringing up the fact that I have never heard of anyone riding birches the way Frost describes the activity here. I even have trouble imagining how it would be possible. I looked on the web and couldn’t find any videos of it. And more to the present point, despite it being what the poem is, on the surface, “about,” Ed Young doesn’t illustrate any kids doing it. Perhaps he didn’t know what it looked like either.

What Young’s paintings do re-create is the peculiar forest camouflage of the distinctly patterned birch trees. The way their short horizontal stripes balance the long verticals of their trunks and the spangle of their canopy, a very dome of sky flecked with shimmering fire. And of course there are those country things, like bringing in hay and walking the dog. This is the landscape and poetryscape of memory, if you were there. The past is another version of the poem’s vision of heaven that we can climb toward, if only to be dropped gently back to earth. And I can’t say I’d mind being snatched away to such a place, not to return.

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