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New Beginnings and Harsh Truths

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Are we ever really satisfied with the life we live? The wish of the old to be young again, the poor man to be rich, the unhappy to be happy, leads us to ask ourselves, do second chances really exist. Could we change things if they did? The search for truth and the meaning of life has often been a long and painful journey filled with indecision and the desire to be something other than what we have become. Like Robert Frost in the poem Birches, many have sought the answers by looking towards the heavens, while others find the need to look below the surface in search of the truth, such as Adienne Rich in her the poem, Diving into the Wreck. Robert Frost’s "Birches" is in blank verse with unrhymed lines consisting of iambic pentameter in each line. The language is arranged through the use of images, not metaphors or similes and the use diction is both conversational and humorous. The reader finds that the narrator is an elderly man, much as Frost is himself, looking at birch trees in a forest that are arched towards the ground in which they are rooted. The narrator imagines that the bends in the birches are from the result of “some boy’s been swinging them”(Frost 3). The narrator has clearly experienced this desire himself as he states “So was I once myself a swinger of birches” (41). As he stands reminiscent of younger days, his thoughts portray the arched birches as blissful and full of sexual imagery and as he gazes at the arches he imagines that the bends are “Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair”. (19) The narrator imagines a boy swinging on the branches, climbing up the tree trunks and swinging from side to side, from earth up to heaven. The reader can imagine a young boy alone, coming of age, as time passes “Whose only play was what he found himself, / Summer or winter, and could play alone” (26-27). A boy becomes a man with a man’s desires and responsibilities as he “One by one he subdued his father’s trees / by riding the down over and over again / Until he took the stiffness out of them, / and not one but hung limp” (28-31. A boy soon grown to a man with all the drudgery that comes with age wishing once again for the chance to be a swinger of birches

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