Dust of Snow

“Ode to the West Wind” by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1820)

Shelley is an English Romantic, and Romantics tended to view nature as stormy and overwhelming. “Ode to the West Wind” represents such a dramatic view, with Shelley depicting nature and the seasons as wild and carelessly violent. Unlike “Dust of Snow,” nature doesn’t make Shelley’s speaker feel better. Instead, Shelley’s speaker sees their tormented self in nature’s tumult. While Frost’s speaker twists the symbolism of nature, Shelley’s speaker retains the conventional symbolism, with winter representing harshness and spring signifying hope.

“Fire and Ice” by Robert Frost (1920)

“Fire and Ice” is another lyric in Frost’s collection of poems, New Hampshire. The title suggests a binary, but Frost’s speaker subverts the binary by speculating that the world could end due to fire (violent passion) or ice (stony apathy). As in “Dust of Snow,” the speaker in “Fire and Ice” is stark and formal, and neither speaker divides the world into two discrete units. Unhappiness and happiness coexist, and so do fire and ice.

“The Crazy Woman” by Gwendolyn Brooks (1960)

Gwendolyn Brooks is a 20th-century American poet. Unlike Frost, Brooks spent much of her life in the Midwest in Chicago.