Imagery in Frost's Dust of Snow
How a Poem Can Use Language to Create Pictures
How can a poet create pictures in the minds of his readers through words alone? Countless schoolchildren will have been taught the standard answer to this question over the years: use of descriptive adjectives, simile and metaphor to help build an image in our minds.
But what if a poem uses none of these techniques? Take the following poem by American poet Robert Frost:
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 had rued.
We can all imagine the snowy white landscape, the speaker wandering through the countryside in regretful mood until he is cheered by a chance encounter with a crow. We can feel the chill of the powdery snow as the bird dislodges it from a branch onto the speaker’s head. We can sense how he feels energized by this event.
Yet a closer examination of the poem reveals that it contains no similes, metaphors or adjectives at all, the only purely descriptive word being the “hemlock” of the noun phrase “hemlock tree”. So how can we form the images so clearly?
The first stanza relies on the techniques of familiarity, connotation and contrast. Frost tends to set his poems in easily recognizable landscapes and locations: even if you are not a resident of the New England countryside, the chances are you can picture a snowy scene, and are familiar with the texture and temperature of the snow. We all know what a crow looks like, and can picture its black feathers standing out against the brilliant white of the snow, creating a memorable contrast which perhaps reflects the different shades of the speaker's mood.
We can also make our own word associations to help us understand the negative mood the speaker finds himself in at the start of the poem: “dust”, “crow” and “hemlock” all carry strong connotations of death which help establish the downbeat tone of the first stanza. The use of predominantly concrete nouns allows us to visualize a realistic, physical scene before we move to the more abstract, mental processes of the concluding half of the poem.
The second stanza reflects a more positive frame of mind, and is therefore free from the negative images contained in the first. However, we can tell that the speaker still feels a little regret – the encounter with nature has only managed to rescue “some” part of his bad day. The poem does end on a positive note though: the final line contains an additional syllable which forces us to place emphasis on the word “had”, thereby assuring us that the dark cloud hanging over the speaker has lifted to at least some degree.
So there you have it: a small but effective poem demonstrating that size isn’t always everything.
For further discussion of Frost's poems including Road Not Taken, Nothing Gold Can Stay and Stopping by Woods, please click on the appropriate link.
