Robert Frost Rhetorical Analysis Essay

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Robert Frost describes the idea of escaping from life’s problems through the imagery of birch trees. To begin, Frost starts the movement by saying when he sees the birches bend, he “like(s) to think some boy’s been swinging them” (Frost 3). Which brings up the idea of escaping. He continues this idea in the next lines, “But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay./ Ice- storms do that.” (4 & 5). The capitalization of “Ice- storms” suggest Frost uses personification to say the ice storms are the problems in life. Frost then talks about how heavy the ice storms could be and how one would “think the inner dome of heaven had fallen” (13) implying that these heavy “ice storms” could feel like one’s problems are big. At the end of the first movement, Frost uses more personification by saying “... when Truth broke in/ With all her matter-of-fact …show more content…

Robert Frost continues the second movement with “I should prefer to have some boy bend them” (23). By this he means that even though he knows about reality, he still prefers to think about an easier time of life. In the second movement, there was a noticeable connotation that appeared suggestive. “One by one he subdued his father’s trees/ By riding them down over and over again/ … And not one but hung limp, not one was left” (28-31). The explanation for this connotation could be that imagining an easier life is pleasurable. He starts the last and third movement with returning to the idea of escapism: “So was I once myself a swinger of birches./ And so I dream of going back to be” (41 & 42). The third movement, Frost continues by focusing on the visual appeal and explaining how life gets confusing “... and tickles with the cobwebs/ Broken across it, and one eye is weeping/ From a twig’s having lashed across it open” (45-47). The figurative language used there is suggested that life comes with obstacles and it gets