In “After Apple-Picking” and in “Birches” (as well as “Wild Grapes”), the trees of life and of knowledge combine in a garden that never was and never will be perfect. Moments of skillful play are the best way to create, as he called it, “a momentary stay against confusion.” In “Birches,” the speaker, “weary of considerations,” dreams of such a momentary stay through the boyhood memory of swinging on birch trees. The boy climbs only “Toward heaven,” letting go and returning to earth because “Earth’s the right place for love.” And even though he knows how imperfect love can be—from the excesses of cruelty, selfishness, and desire—he admits, “I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.” Frost expresses both the power and limitations of art in the concluding line “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.” As a poet, one has rarely done better.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

Bagby, George. Robert Frost and the Book of Nature. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993.

Barron, Jonathan, and Earl Wilcox, eds. Roads Not Taken: Rereading on Robert Frost. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000.

Brodsky, Joseph, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott. Homage to Robert Frost. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996.

Brower, Reuben. The Poetry of Robert Frost: Constellations of Intention. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963.

Buxton, Rachel. Robert Frost and Northern Irish Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Cady, Edwin H., and Louis J. Budd, eds. On Frost. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.

Cook, Reginald. Robert Frost: A Living Voice. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980.

Faggen, Robert. Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.

Faggen, Robert, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Gerber, Philip. Robert Frost. New York: Twayne, 1966.

Hall, Dorothy Judd. Contours of Belief. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1984.

Hass, Robert Bernard. Going by Contraries: Frost’s Conflict with Science. Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 2002.

Hoffman, Tyler. Robert Frost and the Politics of Poetry. Hanover: The University of New England Press, 2001.

Ingebretsen, Ed. Robert Frost’s Star in a Stone-boat: A Grammar of Belief. San Francisco: Catholic Scholars Press, 1994.

Jost, Walter. Rhetorical Investigations. Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 2004.

Kearns, Katherine. Robert Frost and a Poetics of Appetite. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Kilcup, Karen. Robert Frost and Feminine Literary Tradition. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1999.

Lentricchia, Frank. Modernist Quartet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Monteiro, George. Robert Frost and the New England Renaissance. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1988.

Oster, Judith. Toward Robert Frost: The Reader and the Poet. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1991.

Pack, Robert. Belief and Uncertainty in the Poetry of Robert Frost. Hanover: The University of New England Press, 2003.

Parini, Jay. Robert Frost: A Life. New York: Henry Holt, 1999.

Poirier, Richard. Robert Frost and the Work of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Pritchard, William. Robert Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986.

Richardson, Mark. The Ordeal of Robert Frost. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997.