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Birches Study Guide & Notes

This Study Guide consists of approximately 49 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Birches.
This section contains 1,254 words
(approx. 5 pages at 300 words per page)
Purchase our Birches Study Guide

Birches Summary & Study Guide Description

Birches Summary & Study Guide includes comprehensive information and analysis to help you understand the book. This study guide contains the following sections:

This detailed literature summary also contains For Further Study on Birches by Robert Frost.

Birches Poem Summary

Preview of Birches Summary:

"Birches" is a poem of fifty-nine lines without any stanza breaks. However, the poem does contain several sections that move from naturalistic description to a fanciful explanation of why the birches are bowed, and it concludes with philosophical exploration of a person's existence in the world.

Lines 1-4

Frost opens the poem with an image of the birches bent "left and right / across the lines of straighter darker trees" (lines 1-2) and quickly puts forth one explanation for how they got that way: a boy had been swinging on them. Right away, however, he admits this is false, saying in line 4, "But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay." However, the image of the playful boy is a powerful one for Frost, and he will soon return to it.

Lines 5-11

The first break in the poem occurs in line 5 when Frost admits that it is ice storms, not...
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This section contains 1,254 words
(approx. 5 pages at 300 words per page)
Purchase our Birches Study Guide
Copyrights
Birches from BookRags and Gale's For Students Series. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.
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