The title is only a calendar date, and it sets the tone for what follows: a note made in passing, an observation rather than a speech. Early March sits between seasons, with winter not finished and spring not yet certain, and the poem lives in that gap. In nine lines it records two kinds of damage, ice and hunger, and then turns on one small word, "but," toward something that survives.
The first stanza borrows an everyday idiom, "can only bend so far before they break," and quietly returns it to its literal meaning. We usually say it about people under pressure, but here it describes paper birches. The line break helps. "Can only bend" ends the line, so the bending is stretched out, and then "so far before they break" arrives with the snap. The sounds also carry the weight. "Break," "weight" and "rain" share one long vowel, so the stanza closes on a slow, heavy chord, and "freezing rain" feels as dense as the load it describes. Nothing in the lines is dramatic. The tone is flat and factual, and the damage seems more serious for it.
The second stanza brings a different kind of harm. Rhododendron leaves are "tough as old scrolls," a simile that does two jobs. It tells us the leaves are leathery and resistant, and it makes them seem like texts, old and rolled and valuable. Then comes "stripped / by starving deer," with its hissing run of s sounds and the passive "are stripped," which hides any sense of intent. The deer are not villains. They are as desperate as the plants, and the poem lets both sides suffer without blame. Toughness, the stanza suggests, is not the same as safety. The long word "rhododendron" fills the whole first line, and the stanza ends on the short, bare "deer," as if the large and sturdy thing had been reduced in a single breath.
Everything changes with "but some always resprout from the roots." Each word counts. "Some" is honest, because not everything makes it. "Always" turns one spring into a pattern. "Roots" puts the survival where the ice and the deer cannot reach, underground and out of sight. The grammar also leaves a question open. We aren't told whether "some" means birches, rhododendrons or both, so the recovery belongs to the whole woodland rather than to one species.
The last two lines are the most surprising: "having who knows how many / lifetimes of practice." The phrase "who knows how many" is casual, even shrugging, and it admits the speaker cannot count what the plants have been through. The line break holds that number in suspense before "lifetimes" stretches the poem far beyond one bad winter. Then there is "practice." Resilience here is not luck or stubbornness but something rehearsed and improved, like a craft handed down. The roots seem to know how to recover because they have done it before, and the "scrolls" of the second stanza find an echo in this idea of accumulated experience.
The form supports this quiet confidence. The poem has no rhyme, no capital letters and no punctuation at all, not even a full stop at the end. Each three-line stanza holds exactly one sentence, so the poem moves in three even steps, two of loss and one of renewal. The missing final full stop is easy to read as an open ending, with the resprouting still going on when the words run out. The vocabulary is mostly plain and short (*bend, break, rain, deer, roots*), which makes the longer words, "rhododendron," "resprout" and "lifetimes," stand out as the places where size, growth and time enter the poem.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds back. It never mentions people, yet "bend so far before they break" invites us to think of ourselves. It never promises that things will be fine, only that "some" will come back. Readers who know Robert Frost's "Birches" may remember ice-bowed trees there too, but this poem has no romance about them, only limits and recovery. Its hope is earned and modest, and it rests on what can't be seen from above the ground.