the Pulitzer Prize for poetry four times. Congress also voted him a gold medal, in

“recognition of his poetry, which has enriched the culture of the United States and the

philosophy of the world” (Costello 543). The poem “Birches” was first published in 1915

(Thomason 18). In Robert Frost’s “Birches,” the theme of reality vs. imagination is

discovered through images of bent birches, symbolism of a boy swinging the trees, and the

The conflict of reality vs. imagination is explored through images of bent birches. Reality

is depicted as birches bending and cracking after a freezing rain from the ice that was left

behind. Frost let’s the reader know that this is reality in lines 3-4: “I like to think some

boy’s been swinging them. But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay.” He tells the

reader the real reason of what bent the birches in line 5 when he states “Ice-storms do

that.” In the next six lines, Erica Smith notes, “we are inclined to view the ice storm

negatively because Frost has used it to refute his hoped-for explanation in line three”

the outside world and choosing his own reason of why the birches are bent (Thomason

interpretation replaced the reality of the ice storm being the cause (Thomason 15,16).

With this feeling, the speaker makes reality sound harsh and cruel. The “heaps of broken

reader to use their imagination in line 48 by letting us know that he himself likes “to get

we tend to imagine many things during our lives but we are always on the run that we

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