A fine poem about urban isolation, and one of Frost’s best (and most accessible) poems. This is another poem about walking and despairing: the poet wanders the city at night, and finds little to comfort him among the dark streets. This sonnet-like poem (for more on this, click on our analysis below) begins and ends with the same line, which also provides the poem with its title: ‘I have been one acquainted with the night’. But one of the problems in interpreting the meaning of this poem is that Frost’s speaker refuses to tell us how he feels about his solitary wandering through the night: he is, to borrow a phrase from the poem, ‘unwilling to explain’. This one is slightly unusual in Robert Frost’s oeuvre in focusing on the urban rather than rural world of many of his other famous poems. When Frost says that he would like to ‘come back to and begin over’, there’s a sense of wistfulness that extends far greater than birch-swinging, hinting at the adult’s vain yearning to return to childhood and live his life over again. Contrasting the birches with ‘straighter darker trees’ which surround them, Frost says he likes to think they are bent because a boy has been swinging on them. easily bent) but strong (not easily broken). In summary, the poem is a meditation on these trees, which are supple (i.e. ‘Birches’ draws on Robert Frost’s childhood memories of swinging on birch trees as a boy.
That’s the way to go! Unfortunately, the birches Frost sees in this poem turn out to have been bent, not by a boy swinging from them, but from an ice-storm – but Frost prefers the more romanticised notion of play his imagination dreams up. ‘One could do worse than be a swinger of birches’: so concludes this wonderful blank-verse meditation on the fun of playing around with these fine trees, swinging from them – even dying by falling from them.