Change Your Heart Mood with Frost’s ‘Dust of Snow’
I try not to repeat poets in this column. But Robert Frost is just too important. What else can you expect from a poet who won the Pulitzer four times and recited one of the most memorable inaugural poems, “The Gift Outright,” which he blurted out when the sun’s glare kept him from being able to read the poem he’d prepared.
One of the joys of Frost’s ubiquity is that his poems turn up in fiction. In D.L.S. Evatt’s “Bloodlines & Fencelines,” a murder mystery, the reference occurs midway through the book when a man on the fence repair crew at a cemetery quotes “Mending Wall”: “Old Bobby Frost had it about right. Something in the world doesn’t take to a wall.”
An even more unlikely Frost sighting occurs in “The Outsiders,” by S.E. Hinton, when Ponyboy and Johnny are hiding out in an abandoned church. Pony recites “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” Hearing the poem for the first time, Johnny says, “Where’d you learn that? That was what I meant.”
That’s Frost for you. He says what you meant.
I first encountered “Dust of Snow” because it serves as the epigraph for John M. Marzluff’s work of beautiful science, In the Company of Crows and Ravens. The poem is ninety-nine years old.
Read more at Tweetspeak Poetry
“Megan Willome has captured the essence of crow in this delightful children’s collection. Not only do the poems introduce the reader to the unusual habits and nature of this bird, but also different forms of poetry as well.”
—Michelle Ortega, poet and children’s speech pathologist
