Betulaceae

Obviously there is another side to Thoreau with which "Birches" does not strife. A Thoreau more suitable to Frost shows up in a Journal passage six months before the striking ice tempest of December 31, 1852. He expresses: "Nature must be viewed humanly to be viewed at all; that is, her scenes must be associated with humane affections, such as are associated with one's native place, for instance. She is most significant to a lover. A lover of Nature is preeminently a lover of man. If I have no friend, what is Nature to me? She ceases to be morally significant" (163). For Thoreau this sort of valiantly humanistic estimation welled forward most obviously on an early summer's day. The dead of winter, we have seen, could bring out different emotions. In any case, Frost's humanism turned into a harder, more solid thing in its midwinter setting of ice and snow (UP of Kentucky,1988) The swings in awareness amongst fictive and objective universes are reflected in a progression of perfectly placed linguistic pivots. Consider: the conjunctive "but," lines 5, 21; or the conjunctive "and," lines 42, 49, 55; or the inconspicuous semantic vagueness of "shed" (line 10) and "trailing" (line 18) which focuses us at the same time outward (in target reference) to the barbaric universe of nature- - of birches as birches- - and internal (expressive reference) to the warm, encompassing universe of Frost's consciousness, of twisted birches as young ladies tossing their hair before them, drying in…