"Swinging a Birch Tree"

SWINGING ON A BIRCH-TREE. Lucy Larcom 1824-1893 from Childhood Songs

SWINGING on a birch-tree

To a sleepy tune,

Hummed by all the breezes

In the month of June!

Little leaves a-flutterSound like dancing drops

Of a brook on pebbles, —

Song that never stops.

Up and down we seesaw:

Up into the sky;

How it opens on us,

Like a wide blue eye!

You and I are sailors

Rocking on a mast;

And the world's our vessel:

Ho! she sails so fast!

Blue, blue sea around us;

Not a ship in sight;

They will hang out lanterns

When they pass, to-night.

We with ours will follow

Through the midnight deep;

Not a thought of danger,

Though the crew's asleep.

O, how still the air is!

There an oriole flew;

What a jolly whistle!

He's a sailor, too.

Yonder is his hammock

In the elm-top high:

One more ballad, messmate!

Sing it as you fly!

Up and down we seesaw;

Down into the grass,

Scented fern, and rosebuds,

All a woven mass.

That's the sort of carpet

Fitted for our feet;

Tapestry nor velvet

Is so rich and neat.

Swinging on a birch-tree!

This is summer joy,

Fun for all vacation,—

Don't you think so, boy?

Up and down to seesaw,

Merry and at ease,

Careless as a brook is,

Idle as the breeze.

Birches Robert Frost 1874-1963

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay
As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows—
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father's trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig's having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.