The Meaning of Being a Swinger of Birches

Robert Lee Frost voiced the twentieth-century conflict between reason and unreason, doubt and faith. He could doubt without denying; believe without affirming; see the bad without wishing sentimentally to make it better. Frost's poetry is modern in its complexity of thought and in its awareness of the confusion of belief and the fragmentization of earlier human values. Life, as Frost saw it, is full of apparent paradoxes. It is tragic and hilariously comic, beautiful and ugly, chaotic and unified. Like most modern poets, Frost leaves much unsaid. His apparently simple poems often turn out to be rich in hidden meanings. In his poems every word carries a particular weight of meaning. For example; in his poem, Birches, the weighty description of the ice-storm which requires twenty lines are vital to an understanding of the speaker's desire to be a swinger of birches.