Looking Back Birches is a nostalgic poem filled with fond memories and fantasies, yet there is a longing for escape underwritten in the clever choice of words. Robert Frost sets up a conversation with someone’s present self and this person’s self as a young boy. There is a man narrating this poem. The old man is looking at his present life full of hard ships. He is also looking back on his life as a child, wishing he could somehow go back to a better time filled with pleasant memories. In the first twenty-two stanzas of the poem the old man is having a dialogue with himself. He is arguing about whether or not nature bends the birches or a youn