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Stanza 1–2 (Lines 1–5): When I see birches bend to left and right Across the lines of straighter darker trees, I like to think some boy’s been swinging them. But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay As ice-storms do. Explanation: The speaker observes birch trees bending and imagines a boy has been swinging on them. But he knows that the actual cause is something else — nature itself, specifically ice storms. Stanza 3–5 (Lines 6–20): Often you must have seen them Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning After a rain. They click upon themselves As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel. Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust— Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen. They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load, And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed So low for long, they never right thems...

" When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d" by Walt Whitman is an elegy written in honor of President Abraham Lincoln after his assassination in April 1865. The poem blends grief, nature, death, and national mourning through rich symbolism and long, meditative free verse.  1.(Stanza 1–3) Whitman sets the scene in spring, a time of renewal, but juxtaposes it with deep sorrow. The lilacs blooming in the dooryard become a symbol of mourning . “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d, And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night, I mourn’d—and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.” Here, the lilac represents love and memory, while the western star (Venus) symbolizes Lincoln, who has “drooped” or died. 2.(Stanza 4–7) Whitman introduces three central symbols : The lilac (memory and grief) The star (Lincoln) The hermit thrush (voice of mourning, nature’s elegy) “In the dooryard fronting an old farm-house near the white-wash’d paling...