I don't know where it's likely to go better. The experience of love torments him as much as it strengthens him. In his poem, it strongly suggests that Love is one of the reasons that gives him the urge to run away, but it is also the reason why he chooses to return to earth instead of escaping to other places. ![]() It is marked that his will of returning is based on the appreciation he shows towards life - and that is what he finds on earth: Love. It’s something I believe Jim’s dad knew long before I did.Because of his weariness of considerations, and that he feels lost in life - And life is too much like a pathless wood, he wants to leave this place for a little while - not permanently, though - so that he can leave all his obligations and responsibilities behind, and before long, he would like to come back and face them. Perhaps, in its own way, the modest Frost paperback was a how-to book – about living with life’s ups and downs and finding reasons, even on our toughest days, to land on the side of love. Frost offers this epiphany: “Earth’s the right place for love / I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.” In “Birches,” the speaker seeks a tree’s upper branches when “life is too much like a pathless wood.” His escape, however, is temporary the birch eventually bends under his weight and sets him on the ground. At the end of his life, he told Jim what he had experienced on that island beach – things that were, until then, unspeakable. As a Marine during World War II, he was part of a battallion that stormed Iwo Jima. It wasn’t until years later that I sussed out why Jim’s father was so reticent. ![]() He’d look up and politely say hello before returning to his newspaper or book. When I visited my friend’s house, his dad was usually sitting in his living room chair, reading. I often saw his father in the driveway tending to his green Plymouth Fury. Jim lived right across the street from me on River Avenue in Providence. What prompts this wish? The weary speaker tells us he’d “like to get away from earth awhile / And then come back to it and begin over.” Who can’t relate to his desire for a reprieve from life’s difficulties? The speaker in the poem recalls climbing to the top of birch trees as a boy and flinging himself outward feet first to bend the trees: “So was I once myself a swinger of birches” he says. ![]() ![]() I first encountered Frost in high school when his poem “Birches” was assigned in my freshman English class. I would have pegged Jim’s dad as a reader of history and how-to books, not poetry. The worn paperback had belonged to his father. My rake tugs at wet leaves beneath the birch tree in my backyard, making me think of the collection of Robert Frost poems that my friend Jim gave me. John Walsh is a partner in the East Greenwich-based communications firm, Walsh & Associates. He writes a monthly Op-Ed column for the Providence Journal, which published an earlier version of this essay. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.” We hear similarly wise words from John Walsh. The poet Mary Oliver wrote, “Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It’s a truism, isn’t it, that life is filled with ups and downs, twists and turns, tugs to the right when we were planning to turn left. One measure of a life is how we cope with adversity.
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