So Was I Once Myself

I've always loved the poem "Birches" by Robert Frost. I read it first in college and was arrested by how familiar and right its images were, by how apt and true its bittersweet longing.

 It captures a piece of my childhood I like to remember, though in the case of my brothers and I, any slender sapling would do.  I've grown too large now, and I miss the exhilaration of a quick shimmy up, the parachute swoop down in a cloud of leaves.

Needless to say, I'm glad to see the girls enjoy trees. Pip is the most recent girl to fall in love, though one evening last summer she climbed too high into the slight upper branches to return, and I had to fetch a ladder to bring her to earth again.  She clambered at least twice as high as she was here and then mewed pitifully like a little cat frozen at the top.

 

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.