Literary Analysis: A Boy's Will

Robert Frost was an American poet. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England using them to examine complex social and philosophical themes …show more content…
A Boy’s Will deals with this theme explicitly, tracing the development of a solitary youth as he explores and questions the world around him. Frost’s later work depicts youth as an idealized, edenic state full of possibility and opportunity. But as his poetic tone became increasingly jaded and didactic, he imagines youth as a time of unchecked freedom that is taken for granted and then lost. The theme of lost innocence becomes particularly poignant for Frost after the horrors of World War I and World War II, in which he witnessed the physical and psychic wounding of entire generations of young people. Later poems as “Birches” “Acquainted with the Night” , and “Desert Places”, explore the realities of aging and loss, contrasting adult experiences with the carefree pleasures of youth. The poem “Birches” follows a speaker who sees bent birch trees and likes to think that they are bent because boys have been “swinging” them.The theme of poem could be seen as opposition between —truth and imagination, earth and heaven, concrete and spirit, control and abandon, flight and return. The poem yields no shortage of interpretations. It is whole and lovely at the literal level, but it invites the reader to look below the surface and build his or her own understanding. The important thing for the interpreter is to attune her reading to the elements of the poem that may