Robert Frost is a modern poet whose poetry is written to be easily understood and read as though it were everyday speech. He uses free verse to tell of his love and respect for nature. He also utilizes "natural" symbolism in a lot of his writings. He has written about rural landscape and wildlife so much that people often refer to his as a nature poet. In the poem Birches, Frost utilizes "natural" symbolism to explain how heaven is the ideal realm of purity and light, a place in which we can aspire to. He also explains how the tension between earthly satisfactions and higher aspirations emerges from the recollection of a childhood game. The use of unrhymed iambic pentameter helps Frost illustrate his personal experiences of loneliness, love, and desire. Frost's description of loneliness is provided immediately after he first refers to himself with his specific description in Line 20. There he states, "I should prefer to have some boy bend (the birches)". He describes the loneliness of his youth, writing that he was a boy on a farm "too far from town to learn baseball whose only play was found in him". As a young boy, Frosts only amusement was to swing from the birches. His attempts to "conquer" loneliness were demonstrated through the vehicle of the birches. Frost goes on to describe perhaps the most valuable lesson he learned as a child trying to overcome loneliness, the lesson of "practice makes perfect". Frost states "He always kept his poise to the top of the branches climbing carefully with...pains...Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish kicking his way down through the air to the ground." He learned here that there are times in life when one will conquer a situation be done with it, and fly joyfully away knowing that one has conquered it. Frost also uses Birches to illustrate his experiences with love. He has apparently been hurt by love before, stating, "I'd like to get away from earth and then come back to it ...
