Monday, December 16, 2024

A Way with Words, Part 8: Robert Frost's Surface Tension

I have returned to the poem "Birches" by Robert Frost at various stages of my life since I first discovered it in college more than fifty years ago, and each time its meaning and value deepen for me. As a college student, I was struck by the image of birches bending either by the weight of a boy swinging on them (unlikely, says Frost) or the more possible severe consequences of ice storms. A decade later, as a father, I was taken by the choice of escaping the troubled world by climbing a birch tree to its highest weight-sustaining point or returning to earth, the only place where one can find love. As my wife and I became  empty nesters, I found heartrending the concluding picture Frost paints of spending one's final moments climbing a birch toward heaven. Later, when I saw one of my grandsons atop a tree on my property, I recalled the moment in the poem when Frost considers country boys apart from companionship, which  they would be able to find in the city, entertaining themselves by creating their own games, such as climbing a birch.      

But one moment in the poem has never lost its vividness and significance throughout my adult life. Recollecting a boy climbing a birch, Frost writes:

                ... 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.

The comparison Frost draws is what a scientist would call surface tension, that apparently gravity-defying position that liquid can hold slightly above their container before spilling over. We have all tried that stunt, marveling at how water refuses to drip down our glass even though it exceeds its barrier. Admittedly, I still do so as a challenge on mornings when pouring orange juice into a four-ounce glass. Returning to the lonely boy painstakingly ascending the birch, I delight in the realization that Frost breaks the common belief of youth's reckless abandon. Sure, we can see climbing a tree as reckless, but the boy does so with utmost caution and precision, inclinations we usually do not attribute to children. Even above the brim. I never tire of that moment in "Birches."