I’d like to get away from earth awhile/ And then come back to it and begin over.
― Robert Frost “Birches”

As the polar vortex seizes the Midwest once again, frost reigns. Baby, it’s cold out there seems a wholly insufficient chorus for days when the wind chill never even breaks zero. Yet, as we hunker down and begin to count the days until spring, we might take solace in and wisdom from another Frost–Robert, that is.

I’m an unabashed fan of Robert Frost. My first real encounter with him was during music class in sixth-grade when we sang a musical version of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Even today, I can sing it and can hear the twelve-year-old voices (tethered to some semblance of tune with Miss Daniel’s magical pitch pipe) that filled the room at Park Elementary School. Whose woods these are, I think I know. . .

I had more serious encounters with Frost as an English major and poet in the 70s when the predominant culture and craft of poetry was free verse, a form that some poets and critics argued was, in reality, formless. Frost himself was no fan of free verse poetry, which, he claimed, was much like playing tennis without a net. Then–and now–I’ve straddled the prosodic line between traditional and free verse forms. I like both. I see and hear the craft of both. In my world, they live companionably in a space which respects and loves each for what it is.

But it’s the marriage of Frost’s delight and wisdom that might warm our souls as we bluster through these frigid weeks. In his poem, “Birches,” he writes of a boy who learns to ride birch trees which have been glazed with ice and bent to the frozen earth below. A “swinger of birches,” the boy “flung outward, feet first, with a swish,/ Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.” And when he’s “weary of considerations,” and “life is too much like a pathless wood,” he wishes that he just might escape it all by leaving earth for heaven. As the Omicron strain of Covid ravages our communities, I’m guessing that there are a lot of folks who’d like to “get away from earth awhile/And then come back to it to begin over.” If a cosmic do-over were possible, most of us would probably take it.

And yet, the boy’s joy in riding the birch trees towards heaven lands in Frost’s final wisdom:

Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

As an 18-year-old who couldn’t imagine leaving Earth which was absolutely “the right place for love,” I first read these lines in my freshman composition course. Today, as a seasoned 66-year-old, I cling to the wisdom of escape and return, the glorious awareness that “one could do worse than be a swinger of birches.” Escape comes in many forms for us, some more healthy and positive than others. But it comes as a balm to our earth-weary souls for times such as this. It’s redemptive but temporary, Frost argues, for the “coming back” is necessary for us mortals. As I look out my window to the timber beyond, I can imagine “both going and coming back,” and, for today, this enough.

As the world seems to spin out of control–at least, out of our individual control–we also might take solace in these words from Robert Frost:

We can make a little order where we are, and then the big sweep of history on which we can have no effect doesn’t overwhelm us. We do it with colors, with a garden, with the furnishings of a room, or with sounds and words. We make a little form, and we gain composure.

Why not “make a little order where we are”? Sound advice for those of us who often feel the chaos pressing in. To “gain composure” through the small ways we order our lives–through baking or bird-watching or woodworking or scrapbooking–is truly something. Perhaps, in truth, it’s everything. For Frost (and for me), “Every poem is a momentary stay against the confusion of the world.” But he understood that it isn’t the means of holding back the chaos, but the fact that we each find our own “little order” in something. When I’m writing or walking the country roads, I make my own order, one word and one step at a time.

I’ll leave you with this, a diamond in Frost’s jewel box of wisdom:

In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.

Whether I escape and come back or create a little order in a world of chaos, life goes on. There’s something comforting about this promise, for even when we’ve had dark days, a new, perhaps brighter (and warmer?) one, comes on its heels. Frost was a realist but still an optimist. Though he claimed to be one “acquainted with the night,” he was also a “swinger of birches,” momentarily escaping the darkness but always returning to the light. One could do worse.