Launching too soon

Claire Doll
Class of 2024

(3/2022) I never climbed trees as a child.

I wanted to – don’t get me wrong. There was an oak tree in the backyard of my old home, and I always dreamed of climbing it: the arching branches extending into thin twigs; the sturdy trunk keeping me stable through wavering winds; the lush green leaves like stars of their own sky. But for some inexplainable reason, I never got around to it. Now that oak tree, along with the rest of my childhood home, belongs to someone else. It only exists as a memory to me.

When reflecting upon Robert Frost’s birthday on March 26th, I chose a poem at random: "Birches." Upon reading the first three lines, I had already felt saddened in some way. Here, the narrator notes that whenever he sees a tree, he hopes that at some point in time, a boy has swung on the wooden branches, has enjoyed the beauty and spontaneity that a tree has to offer, even if it is just a tree. For some reason, the imagery of this poem stuck with me. Frost beautifully strings sentences together to reveal delicate imagery of birch trees "loaded with ice a sunny winter morning after a rain" (6-7). Here, he depicts how birch trees are normally coated in ice from a snowstorm, how we assume these trees are bent and wilted because they are frozen. Frost gets lost in this description before returning to the idea of this boy. He writes, regarding the birch tree branches, "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" (23-27). Reading this imagery of a made-up story about a boy, I couldn’t help but ask the question: Why was the narrator envisioning this? What affinity does he have to the image of a young boy swinging on bent tree branches, rather than the reality that nature has made them that way?

This is because later in the poem, we find out that the narrator used to be one of those boys. He would escape to a world that only a tall and wavering birch tree could provide, a world of arching branches and lush green leaves. The narrator dreams of this childlike experience "when I’m weary of considerations / And life is too much like a pathless wood" (43-44). It is a simple thing, he concludes, to be a climber of tree, to be able to both escape the world and bask in the beauty that the earth holds.

There is one line, however, that truly resonated with me, leaving my heart longing for something I couldn’t describe. When this young boy that the narrator envisions climbs the birch tree, it is said that "He learned all there was / To learn about not launching out too soon" (32-33). One could interpret this literally, arguing that the boy had learned to control climbing the tree, so he did not fall. I, however, imagined a little child swinging back and forth on branches, staring up at the stretch of blue that was the sky, knowing full well that this was youth, that this was ephemeral and would never be lived again.

As a sophomore in college, had I fully launched into adulthood? There surely wasn’t any more opportunity for me to climb the oak tree wildly and freely in the backyard of my old house. I was too busy with six classes, two jobs, and a bunch of extracurriculars. In short, I was spending much of my time preparing for a future when there was not only a wondrous past I could reflect on, but also a beautiful present unraveling before me. Frost’s intentions in this poem are to speculate on the innocence and magic of childhood, but reading it in my college dorm, I couldn’t help but feel anxious – anxious that I never had that experience of climbing on trees, anxious that I felt lost in the mindless rhythm of growing up, anxious that maybe all the birch trees in my life had been weighed down by ice, not by swinging children.

By using this natural imagery and this imaginative story of a little boy, however, Frost reaches beyond the surface to convey that we will always have that spontaneous spirit within us. Even if we are too old to climb on trees, can’t we still look at birches as if another child has swung on the drooping limbs?

Maybe it’s a good thing that my family sold my childhood home. After reading Frost’s poem, I still wish I had climbed that tree, felt the magic of escaping to a world and dangling from arched branches. Although Frost writes about the wonder of a whimsical childhood, he even more conveys how important it is to apply this joyful and loving perspective to the realities of adulthood. Perhaps, as a college sophomore, this is what I need to focus on. Perhaps I can still see birch trees and imagine the branches are bent because a child has swung on them. Perhaps I can climb a tree myself at the ripe age of twenty and see the world through lenses of innocence and wonder, gazing up and watching the patterns of raindrop-shaped leaves shape the sky. As Frost beautifully says, "Earth’s the right place for love / I don’t know where it’s likely to go better" (52-53). Even though our lives may currently seem treacherous, and even though adulthood is discouraging, there is no better place to celebrate love and beauty than in the present itself. I hope we can all pretend that sunrises are canvases of violet and gold painting the sky, pretend that the moon rises because it loves the stars, and pretend that children have swung on the bent branches of birches. After all, there is never such a thing as launching too soon, for it is simply enough if we can launch at all, and do so while preserving our inner child at heart.

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