In Robert Frost's poem "Birches," the narrator reminisces about the times he had swung on trees and dreams of going back to those days. At the sight of bent birch trees, he likes to think that it is because boys have been swinging on them. Even though he knows that birches are bent by ice storms, he prefers his nostalgic vision of a boy climbing a tree and riding to the ground. The speaker likens birch swinging to "getting away from the earth awhile."
             The speaker of the poem expresses his thoughts of how he likes to think that birches are bent because "some boy's been swinging them." In the first stanza, the speaker is interrupted in his thoughts to explain how the ice storms turn the trees. The ice storms represent the truth and reality that the speaker tries to escape from. The speaker uses the examples of ice storms to symbolize aspects of real-life situations that humans undergo. A boy swinging on the birches is the speaker's way of escaping life and to "get away from earth awhile." The speaker dreams of returning to the times when he had once been a swinger of birch trees when he's "weary of considerations and life is too much like a pathless wood." When one is stuck in a pathless wood, one way to navigate is to climb trees. For a boy climbing a tree is fun and games but for an adult, it is a way of a transcendent escape, and the speaker expresses a wish to "get away from earth awhile and then come back to it and begin over." The speaker does not want his wishes to be half fulfilled and die, he believes that earth is the best place for love and doesn't know where it's likely to go better, and that doesn't give much hope and faith in a happier afterlife.
             The speaker reinforces his ties to earth by saying the world is the right place for love even though his face burns and one eye is weeping. The speaker expresses life as a never-ending journey of sadness and misery mixed with happiness. He demonstrates a balance in life, the g...