In today’s post we are looking at Robert Frost’s short poem, Dust of Snow. What’s going on here?
Dust of Snow
The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I rued The structure is fairly obvious: two stanzas with four lines each in a regular rhyming pattern of abab cdcd. The number of syllables in each stanza is 4445 and 5446. More on that later.
I have been thinking about this poem, and in my little notebook I have been making notes, just a few pages. I assembled together in my head what I thought Frost was up to here, and so then I also went on the internet looking around to see what other folks have said…and it was dismal. This is what I ran into the most, “Frost was walking through the woods with a bad attitude, and then a crow flew from a branch and dropped snow on him, and the hilarity of it changed his mood for the day.”
Ugh.
No.
If I were teaching this in a classroom setting I would give very low marks for that interpretation. I would want to grab my student by the ears and say something like, “Read this poem like the Christian you are!” You know, how we should be reading everything.
There is always more going on than what we see on the surface. Especially with poetry, especially with Frost. Ponder the first few images: crow, dust, snow, hemlock. These all spell death.
The crow is a harbinger of doom, and a gathering of them is called a murder. The crow, or raven, is sent from Noah from the Ark in the midst of the deluge of God’s wrath that covered the earth (Genesis 8.7). It is a detestable animal according to the Law (Leviticus 11.15). It is the bird that eats the corpses of those under the covenant curse left out in the fields, or hanging between heaven and earth (Deuteronomy 28.26). Those who break the commandments of God will have their eyes plucked out by them (Proverbs 30.17).
Dust is a symbol of the curse of sin and the penalty of our sin, death. Dust we are made of and to dust we will return, because all those who sin must die (Genesis 3.19). Dust is the food of the devil (Genesis 3.14), and because we are made of dust, he is always looking to devour us (1 Peter 5.8).
To be sure, snow in Scripture has positive and negative connotations. On one hand, David wants to be cleansed from his sin to be white as snow (Psalm 51.7) and yet, when Miriam bears false witness against Moses’ leadership, she is struck with a striking from God (leprosy) and turns white like snow as a chastisement for her sin (Numbers 12.10). And God has also revealed to us in nature that snow is what arrives when the world dies.
Hemlock, isn’t that what Aristotle took to commit suicide? There is a hemlock in New England that is not poisonous, but the literary connotations, if we are good readers, will illicit death when hemlock is mentioned.
Let me paraphrase the first stanza thusly, “The harbinger of death came, and shook down on me the curse of death, from a tree of death.”
A tree of death? Interesting, we might say. Do we know of any trees where a Man has suffered the bringer of death, and the curse of sin?
Let us carry on to the second stanza where everything changes.
All of this death has given his heart a change of mood, a turning if you will, that saved. There was a day that he rued, but now…no longer. What day does one rue the most? Rue means to feel sorrow or grief, or even to repent. We have a change of heart, salvation, and a historic variant of the word for repent. Hmmm, what could possibly be going on here?
The day we have the most sorrow for is, of course, the day of our own death. Frost once loathed the day of his own death, but now he no longer does, because he has been given a new heart and has been saved. For Christians, death is not a day of sorrow any longer, because Jesus died on the tree, took the curse of sin from off us, grabbed the keys of Hades, and made it the only way to be with Him. We now walk through the Valley of the Shadow fully lit by the presence of our Lord and the open door at the other end.
That’s where I arrived in my analysis, but then I read another post. This one from Remy Wilkins, and I realized that I was on to something. Read what he has to say here. Check out his Substack here. His books here, and here (my kids love Strays).
Remy points out that the covering of snow is significant, but what we should also notice is the way in which Frost is covered in white, namely, by the ascension of the crow. Good point!
And then, Remy brings out this really neat thing in which I am reminded that poems should be read aloud. Read the whole thing out loud and the final word has a double meaning, rued and rood. You wouldn’t know which one it is, unless you read the words. By hearing the poem we are left with some ambiguity, and the word rood is a historic word for the cross.
What’s more is that Remy pulls out the poetic jujitsu and throws us in to the meter of the poem revealing the forever altered heartbeat of Frost. Good stuff.
I don’t want to simply repeat what Remy wrote, I’d rather you go read it yourself. Please, do. Then tell him on his Substack to do some more posts like that.