Paideia Seminar Plan

“Birches”

by Robert Frost

Course/Participants: Secondary English Students

Ideas and Values: Nature, Wisdom, Delight, Truth

PRE-SEMINAR

Content (Present relevant background information. Prepare participants to discuss selected text.):

1. Discuss irony: discrepancy between levels of meaning and understanding.

2. With partner, read poem on transparency and divide it into sections. Decide how and why to make

divisions.

Process (Review seminar objectives and guidelines. Prepare participants to participate in seminar discussion—self assess and set goal(s): Establish group and individual goals after reviewing roles of both the seminar

participants and facilitator.

SEMINAR

Opening (identify main ideas from the text): How did you divide the poem? (overhead projector) Why?

Core (focus/analyze textual details):

• What is your first impression of the poem? Its tone?
• Frost once said a poem should begin with “delight” and end with “wisdom.” Does this poem do those two things? How? What is this poem’s wisdom?
• What techniques/devices does Frost use to reach this wisdom? This truth?

Closing (personalize and apply the textual ideas): How do you find peace amid the troubles of life?

POST-SEMINAR

Process (Assess individual and group participation in seminar discussion. Refer to recent past as well as future seminar discussions): Conduct group discussion of today’s seminar. Have students write privately about their

success or failure with their individual participation goal. Discuss ways to improve future seminars.

Content (Extend application of textual and discussion ideas; continuation of pre-seminar):

Choose one of the following writing activities:

• Write about a childhood experience and what you learned from it. You may choose to do this in either poetry or prose.
• Celebrate your communion with nature by writing about selected event(s).

“Birches” by Robert Frost

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.
Ice-storms do that. 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
(Now am I free to be poetical?)
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.