Lesson Notes By Weeks and Term - Senior Secondary School 2
READING AND CONTENT ANALYSIS OF NON-AFRICAN POETRY
READING AND CONTENT ANALYSIS OF NON-AFRICAN POETRY
SUBJECT: LITERATURE-IN-ENGLISH
CLASS: SS2
DATE:
TERM: 3RD TERM
REFERENCES
WEEK ONE
TOPIC: READING AND CONTENT ANALYSIS OF NON-AFRICAN POETRY-“Birches” by Robert Frost
CONTENT
CONTENT ANALYSIS
Content Analysis
The poem, “Birches” by Frost is a dramatic monologue that highlights the poet persona’s observation of the trees, birches. He recognises that the ‘birches bend to left and right/Across the lines of straighter darker trees’. From his intuition, he had imagined that the bend is as a result of ‘some boy’s been swinging them.’ But on a second note, he sees that this kind of bend is different in ‘But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay/As ice-storm do.’ What had been the workings of some boys in a pleasurable manner has been left for snow rain to subdue. Due to the change brought in by technology and science, the poet speaker observes that the birches have been left alone for ice storms to deal with. He reveals how snows have forcefully bent the birches into sharps that they find it difficult to ‘right themselves’. He says ‘You may see their trunks arching in the woods/Years afterwards,’ which explains how the negligence of the society has promoted battering of nature in form of trees. But through the aid of flashback, the poet speaker hints on the position in ‘I should prefer to have some boy bend them/As he went out and in to fetch the cows’. From his desire, we realised how his boyhood experience had been in great affinity with swinging on birches in a pastoral setting. He establishes a dichotomy between the lifestyle and interest of the boy in a pastoral setting and modern setting by saying, ‘Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,/Whose only play was what he found himself,/Summer or winter, and could play alone.’ He highlights the excitement that dictates the manner in which ‘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’. In the subsequent lines, he shows us the degree of dexterity deployed by some boy ‘to conquer’ the birches. In his words, ‘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.’ However, the poet persona makes us to understand that he wishes to return to such experiences of his boyhood days in ‘So was I one a swinger of birches/And so I dream of going back to be.’ He goes further to inform that his desire is stirred by frustration with his present modern society as stated in ‘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’. The disappointment recorded in the modern world or society forces him to cry, ‘I’d like to get away from earth awhile/And then come back to it and begin over.’ He calls for a respite from the notion of survival of the fittest which governs how things are run. In order to always ease oneself of the suffocating nature of life of the modern world, he reiterates in the lines: ‘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.’ He reaffirms, ‘One could do worse than be a swinger of birches’ to be completely free like nature.
EVALUATION QUESTIONS
WEEKEND ASSIGNMENT
THEORY
Read the content analysis of the poem in Exam Focus and summarise it.
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