Examine the poet’s use of sight and sound images in Frost’s Birches.

Answer Details

Robert Frost's "Birches" is rich in imagery that appeals to both the eye and the ear, so that the reader seems to see and hear the New England scene the poet describes. His sight and sound images work together to make the birch trees vivid and to carry the poem's meditation on imagination and escape.

Sight (visual) images.

• The poet describes birches "bent to left and right / Across the lines of straighter darker trees," a clear picture of the pale, arched birches against the dark upright forest.
• He paints the ice-storm scene in which the branches are "loaded with ice a sunny winter morning" and shed crystals so that the snow-crust is covered with what looks like "heaps of broken glass," a shining, brittle visual image.
• He compares the bent trees to "girls on hands and knees that throw their hair / Before them over their heads to dry in the sun," a vivid, graceful picture.
• The image of a boy climbing "toward heaven" up a slender trunk and swinging down again gives a clear picture of movement and play.

Sound (auditory) images.

• Frost makes us hear the ice-laden branches: they "click upon themselves / As the breeze rises," a delicate crackling sound.
• He describes how the warming sun makes the frozen branches "crack and craze their enamel," suggesting a sharp splitting noise.
• The falling ice, shed "avalanching on the snow-crust," carries the sound of showering, shattering crystals.

Effect. By fusing these sight and sound images, Frost recreates the sensory reality of the birches so that the natural scene becomes immediate and convincing. This concrete imagery also grounds the poem's larger reflection, the wish to climb "toward heaven" and swing back to earth, in a world we can see and hear, making the poet's yearning for imaginative escape both believable and moving.