One major drawback of "Birches" is that the reader must be careful not to take the wording literally, at face value. "So was I once myself a swinger of birches" does not necessarily mean that the narrator used to hang off of trees like Snoopy, and the statement "And so I dream of going back to be" does not necessarily mean that the speaker wants to climb a birch tree. The important word is "dream." It's our dreams that steel us against the branches of reality that lash across our open eyes.

The poem must be reread again and again to see what the narrator is referring to by taking each statement in the context of surrounding lines and the larger context of the whole poem. The narrator has been imaginative, has subdued reality with the power of the dream, and so he wishes to again.

Another example lies in the line "One by one he subdued his father's trees." We know the ice storms bent the trees, that the boy did not conquer his father's forest. Instead the reader must reread to find that with imagination the boy is able to subdue life's downside, perhaps overcoming the setbacks that his father endured and may now afflict the speaker, who dreams of using imagination to overcome difficult times.

It is also hard for a first-year college student to get past the pretty nature poetry. I could picture a winter scene: "As the breeze rises" and the effect of "the sun's warmth" on the sheaths of ice covering the tree branches. But this is where I ended the scene. I did not picture the shattering of ice "on the snow crust" like "heaps of broken glass to sweep away." Initially, I did not get the shattered feeling; I felt the scene was peaceful.