Frost, unlike his great contemporaries such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams, never stopped using traditional forms in his poems. He continued using strict meter and rhyme forms throughout his career, famously remarking that free verse—poetry written without strict meter or rhyme&mdashwas like "playing tennis without a net."
"Birches" is written in blank verse. Blank verse is a kind of unrhymed, metered poetry that is very common in English. It consists of five "feet" (syllable groups) of two syllables each, in which the first syllable of each foot is unstressed and the second stressed: dah-DUH. This stress pattern is called iambic pentameter: an iamb.....
This is a free excerpt of 109 words. This section contains 216 words. This
study guide contains 14,508 words (approx. 48 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Literature Guide with our Birches Access Pass.
