It is a difficult thing to be gentle in winter; we suffer more, simply because we are what we are & things are what they are; more, we are reduced in a way, our activity is restrained & we begin to look inside instead. But of course there’s usually a poem to make it all better…
The way a crow
shook down on me
the dust of snow
from a hemlock tree
has given my heart
a change of mood
& saved some part
of a day I had rued.
Just count the images of death: Hemlock; the crow itself; maybe even the winter snow. No wonder he rued the day. But it turns into self-deprecatory comedy. The simple iambic rhythm is modified by anapests in the fourth & fifth line, an image of the heart skipping a beat in surprise. The unusual in poetry is an image of fear in our lives. The poet is self-conscious about the way we change even our speech in face of events. The last line is two anapests, the rhythm has slowed down to a statelier pace for a conclusion, as in musical pieces, as in our ordinary speech. Conclusions makes us feel especially moral—lessons learned, lessons taught. Mortality, too, can make us self-important, as when we have bad days; in this case, part of the day was saved in a comic way—the crow, hemlock tree, & snow, after all are not merely symbols, they are also part of a world which, in being somehow free from symbolism, is not really tragic. You might as well laugh at your own self-importance in demanding that the world live up to a sense of doom. Natural beings escape the burden of symbolism & ceremony in a way we cannot; but then there is this serendipitous part... Beauty, you might almost says, is a trap the soul sets for itself, but if you know it is a trap, you could perhaps escape it, even if that mars beauty.
Thanks Titus. Robert Frost is indeed - my favorite poet.
Glad you liked it, Cathy; of course, I thought of you.
I think he spoke for many people, he was the last poet perhaps of Northerners in America...