Frosts Birches and Carvers Cathedral - Essay Example

Frost's "Birches" and Carver's "Cathedral." In "Birches" Frost probes the power of his redemptive fantasy as it moves from its playful stage toward the edge of hazardous transcendence. The transition into transcendence is a transition into an area of fundamental creative freedom where (since redemption has been successful) all possibilities of meeting with the universal realities of understanding are dissolved. In its extreme forms, redemptive perception can become self- crushing as it pushed the imaginative personality into innermost isolation.

"Birches" starts with evoking its centre image against the background of a severe winter landscape: "But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay.Ice-storms do that" (Frost, 4-5). Life is in fact a sequence of ups and downs. This poem shows that people never completely convalesce from being drawn down by reality even if they don't seem distressed. Imagination is described as "a swinger of birches." The depiction of the boy purifies this illustration: "One by one he subdued his father's trees By riding them down over and over again.

" (Frost, 28-29) On the one hand, 'birch swinging' is a metaphoric description of human life: every day we swing between work and leisure, between day and night, between joy and sorrow Human is vulnerable against the power of life and death, of love and hate - and has nothing to do, but to swing or even bow under the pressure of ice winds. On the other hand, 'birch swinging' is a specific perception of loneliness, since the protagonist of the poem is a boy, a child of nature who doesn't know yet all complications of our society.

Frost ends his poem expressing his contentment with overcoming solitude and benefiting from the longing to achieve by writing, "One could do worse than be a swinger of birches" (Frost, 60). The short story "Cathedral" by Raymond Carver is about both physical and spiritual blindness. Even though Bub technically has normal vision, he is blind, since he is not able to understand emotions of a person who is not able to see. Although Bub's words and behaviour when he is interacting with Robert, the blind man, one can see that he does not "see" or realize what Robert's blindness means or how it alters or does not alter him as a personality.

The narrator lives in a limited, well-protected world. He is endangered unexpectedly from without; the appearance of his wife's acquaintance means--at the onset, at least--an invasion into his sheltered life. Bub's hidden unfriendliness, I suppose, is embedded in the blind man's connection with pieces of his wife's past and of her self-sufficient personality --aspects that are frightening him, one of which is her former marriage, a matter which he is fixated on. At the same time fascinated by and unwilling to listen to Robert's story he looks for himself ultimately in his wife's connection with the blind man.

Insistent upon stating his individuality over his wife, thus, he blankets her what earlier life the way he has recently blanketed his current situation --with protecting self- absorbency. Bub doesn't understand that it is possible to see not only with eyes, but also with thought and heart. But the final scene gives him a chance to comprehend another way of perception. Bub tries hard to explain Robert how the cathedral, which is being shown on TV, looks like, but the blind man has an insight and Bub to draw one, whilst Robert has his hands on top of those of the protagonist.

As they sketch the cathedral together, Bub gets high with Robert's spirit, because having closed his eyes; he sees in his mind's eye the contours of a cathedral. He's is not 'blind' any longer, as he understands that blind people have the same world of feelings and see the same colours with their hearts and imagination, even though they are not able to see the reality. Bibliography1) Carver, R.. Cathedral. New York: Random House, 1984. 2) Frost, R. Birches, 2003 http://www.web-books.com/Classics/Poetry/Anthology/Frost/Birches.htm