Compare and Contrast Birches by Robert Frost and Sailing to Byzantium by William Butler Yeats

Frost and Yeats

The poems "Sailing to Byzantium" by William Butler Yates and "Birches" by Robert Frost both tell narratives about one generation and how the death of the old is what allows the present generation to thrive. Whereas Yates uses a narrator describing the evolving mental state of a man who knows that he is not long for this earth, Frost uses the degradation of the forests over time to illustrate the same point. One line of Yates' poem acts as a motto for both: "Whatever is begotten, born, and dies" (line 6). They are epitaphs to a dying generation, which includes the narrators of the poems themselves.

Yeats' poem "Sailing to Byzantium" is a sad tribute to the older generation who can no longer survive in the modern world. "That is no country for old men" (line 1). The narrator, closely approaching death remarks upon the fragile nature of humanity. "An aged man is but a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick" (lines 9-10). What is a man at the end of his life but the self-same coat, tattered from use? In response to this despair, the narrator looks at the end of his life through a lens of spirituality. What separates man from animal is the possession of a soul. Indeed the flesh, says the narrator, is only that of an animal. "Consume my heart away; sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal" (lines 21-22). It is only the flesh, he argues, that is sick and dying. Without the flesh, there is no pain but instead the eternal soul.

In the final stanza, Yeats compares his own legacy to the former kings and queens of Byzantium. As the royals of times gone past were immortalized in gold-leafed pottery, so too the narrator will live in the words of the poet. "Set upon a golden bough to sing / To lords and ladies of Byzantium / Of what is past, or passing, or to come" (lines 30-32). In the final lines of the poem, the narrator has made the full transition from regret over his impending demise to the feeling of acceptance that this is the natural order of things. Men and women have died before the narrator and men and women will die long after he has been forgotten.

In Frost's "Birches," the narrator sees the effects of time on the beloved trees. Of bent branches, the narrator reflects, "I like to think some boy's been swinging them. / But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay. / Ice storms do that" (lines 3-5). Like mankind, the trees are affected by time, each battering by weather or misfortune changing the tree so that it is never exactly the same as it was before it was disturbed. "So low for long, they never right themselves" (line 17). Like the narrator from "Byzantium," the speaker of the Frost poem refuses to give in to the reality of the situation at hand. Instead, he looks for something more beautiful as a possibility.

In the case of Yeats, the narrator imagines his Kingdom of Heaven and how he will be remembered like the kings and queens of long ago. The narrator of "Birches" imagines that instead of the weather being the cause of the destruction of the trees, it is the little boy from the first few lines. "I should prefer to have some boy bend them…One by one he subdued his father's trees / By riding them down over and over again" (lines 25-31). Instead of a boy, the narrator is really imaging himself and how once he was a very young boy who would climb those trees and cavort in their branches. It becomes evident in the final lines that it is the narrator who wishes he could be young enough once again to be a swinger of the birches. For this man, his idea of Heaven is as a branch swinger.