The figurative language being used in the sentence is a simile.

In the poem, the act of swinging on birches is presented as a way to escape the hard rationality or “Truth” of the adult world, if only for a moment. As the boy climbs up the tree, he is climbing toward “heaven” and a place where his imagination can be free.

Frost’s main theme in “Birches” is that life is beautiful and good, more desirable than heaven. He was 40 when he published the poem, and it reveals the feelings of a man in middle age looking both ahead toward death and backward to childhood.

For the speaker in “Birches,” swinging on birch trees symbolizes a temporary return to a youthful carefree state. The narrator is reminiscing about his past – when he was a young boy, without a care in the world, who would spend his days swinging on birches and enjoying his happy youthful life.

The action of swinging is shown as an escape from the reality and hardship of life. For a boy swinging from the birch, it is an act of joy and freedom.

This season the birches have bent, under the weight of ice that sparkles so in the sunlight that it’s easy to see why the makers of slang decided to call diamonds “ice.” They’ll stay bent for a while, and then under the influence of sap and sunlight they will straighten up.

It’s because heavy ice from a storm has built up on the branches so much that they are actually bent downward, much like the speaker himself would bend those branches as a child when he played on them and his weight caused them to bend downward.

Birch trees are used for landscaping due to their delicate foliage, bark coloration and susceptibility to insects. Towering up to 50 feet in height, these trees stand out against any background and make a bold statement. However, sometimes severe windstorms or soil erosion may cause them to lean to one side.

And so, after bearing their icy burden for hours on end, the birches do not bounce back once the ice has melted, and instead are bent permanently toward the earth, “trailing their leaves on the ground/Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair/Over before them to dry in the sun.” The birches remain forever …

When the speaker sees bent birch trees, he likes to think that they are bent because boys have been “swinging” them. He knows that they are, in fact, bent by ice storms. Yet he prefers his vision of a boy climbing a tree carefully and then swinging at the tree’s crest to the ground.

The birches tree in the poem symbolizes the life of the poet and how his perception of life has changed as he’s grown up. The poet wants to believe that the branches are bent by the swinging boy because the poet wishes to escape from the reality and drudgery of everyday life.

Birch trees have black streaks on their trunks to facilitate the exchange of gases between the atmosphere and their internal tissues. Lenticels are directly proportional to growth of birch trees.

Most everyone has some recognition of the birch tree, a tree with light-colored white, yellow, or grayish bark that often separates into thin papery plates and is characteristically marked with long horizontal dark raised lines (also known as lenticils).

Metaphor Examples in Birches:

• “Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more.”
• “May no fate willfully misunderstand me And half grant what I wish and snatch me away Not to return….”
• “one eye is weeping…”
• “like a pathless wood Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs Broken across it,…”

Birches is a single stanza poem of 59 lines. It is a blank verse poem because it is unrhymed and in iambic pentameter.

Birch are trees that are native to Europe and parts of Asia. The leaves, bark, and buds of the tree are used to make medicine. Birch is used for joint pain, kidney stones, bladder stones, urinary tract infections (UTIs), and other conditions, but there is no good scientific evidence to support any use.

Oppositions to birch are relatively few, but it is considered a perishable wood product that rots and decays when exposed to weather. The wood is also susceptible to infestation by bugs.

To see whether or not one of your plants is poisonous (toxic), look it up on this list and check to see what number follows its name….The toxicity of plants.

Height. One possible reason people plant silver birches in groups of three is to reduce their height. Since the birch roots are both deep and wide-spreading, certain gardeners feel that by planting a cluster of three trees, the roots will have to share a small area and, as a result, may limit the height of the trees.

about 8 to 10 feet

Birch is a medium-sized tree that can reach 30 to 50 feet in height. Some species may grow to the height of 80 feet under appropriate conditions. Birch has green leaves that are oval or elliptical in shape. Leaves are single or double serrated on the edges.

Never top a tree. Remove branches less than two inches (5 cm.) in diameter as close as possible to the collar, or thickened area where the branch attaches to the trunk.

Disadvantages of Tree Topping They are disorganized. They destroy the tree’s natural growth. The stress sprouts will shade the tree’s interior branches, causing them to die. The sprouts are much more prone to breakage because they are weakly attached and crowded.

Topping wounds expose a tree to decay and invasion from insects and disease. Also, the loss of foliage starves the tree, which weakens the roots, reducing the tree’s structural strength. While a tree may survive topping, its life span will be significantly reduced.

When a tree is topped, up to 100% of the leaf bearing crown is removed. As leaves are the food source for any tree, the absence of this food supply can temporarily starve the tree. As a defensive action, the starving tree responds by rapidly sending out multiple shoots from latent buds below each cut.

Can I Stop My Tree From Growing Taller?

1. Sometimes keeping a tree at its current height is a must.
2. Guidelines.
3. Trim the top of the tree back to within 2 inches where many other limbs are growing from the trunk.
4. Prune back all the other branches in the same section so that the top stay like the rest of the tree.

Crown. The foliage bearing section of the tree formed by its branches and not including any clear stem/trunk.

One wrong cut won’t immediately kill your tree, but pruning incorrectly or too often can. Keeping the branch collar intact helps make sure the wound properly seals after being pruned, but if it’s injured, the wound could get infected by decay fungi that could further spread within the tree.

Others that are pruned too much may start to languish or die. Be patient. If the tree’s branches weren’t extremely weak or diseased, they should be able to initiate new growth. But, you probably won’t see new blooms in the first, or even the second, year after a massive over pruning.

5 Fastest Ways To Kill Trees

1. Spray Trees. At one of my rentals, I have large Chinese Elm trees.
2. Cut and Remove Tree. If your tree is not a weed tree you may only need to cut it down.
3. Best Chemical Tree Killer.
4. Seal Stump with Plastic.
5. Call An Arborist.
6. Salt.
7. Copper Nails.
8. Girdling.