Transcript

It’s fall, and that means “back-to-school”. We put together this week’s episodes for the educators in our audience — especially those of you who may be looking for a little Slowdown treatment on those classroom classics, from Shakespeare to Frost. We hope you all enjoy these selections, as learners of any age.

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

In our house, we owned a few gaming consoles: Xbox and PlayStation. Initially, I worried about bringing in devices that would disrupt my children’s growth. I thought multiplayer platforms would invite strangers into their ears. I worried about cyberbullying. Social media accounts were out of the question. Extended family teased me because I refused to buy a mobile phone for my ten-year old son. My kids could only use my computer during homework hours. I longed to protect them from the electronic wilderness growing around us. They felt cheated out of experiences most of their friends and cousins were having. I eventually agreed to a cell phone, but I set up the strictest parental controls.

Beyond fears of predators, what I ultimately wanted to protect was their interior life, that part of their imagination that makes up stories, that roams when alone, that part of their mind that muses and ponders life. One of the greatest gifts we can give children is boredom. Maybe unnecessarily, I feared that the deep space within, where they reflect and come to know themselves, would be short-circuited by negative values such as detached violence and errant competition prevalent in a genre of video games.

Instead, I required my children to go outside as an antidote to their virtual realities, as my parents required me to do, especially when they desired their own quiet. Once outside, I explored the entirety of nearby Fairmount Park. Doing so had me reflect on my place in the world, people, and nature.

I have long admired today’s poem by Robert Frost. “Birches” spotlights a young boy who makes his own fun in the outdoors. It’s a poem about self-reliant play. It is powerful for how it precisely describes a boy’s ascent up a tree then his launch onto solid ground. In that sense, the poem becomes an allegory for the speaker, who himself wishes to climb out of his adult world.

When teaching the poem, I talk about Frost’s layered technique: the poem’s three-part structure, symbolic imagery, and use of blank verse, that is, unrhymed iambic pentameter, “across the lines of straighter darker trees” and “Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away.” As readers, we can hear, and even feel, the rising and falling of the poem’s action because of the rhythm. Thematically, the poem expresses a nostalgia for that moment where we were free enough to invite reflection, to cultivate an inwardness that shaped us into independent, feeling people.

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
As ice-storms do. 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
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.