Reading and Writing about Literature / Robert Frost's poem "dust of Snow"

Reading and Writing about Literature

Introduction

Many people read literature for pleasure. many others read literary works mainly to satisfy academic requirements. Duty and pleasure, however, are not mutually exclusive. One of the purposes of this chapter is to introduce you to some of the many pleasures reading literature offers.

Most of those who write about literature typically do so for professional reasons - as book reviewers, as scholars and teachers. as a student in university literature or writing course, you will write about literary works partly to improve your writing ability, partly to increase your understanding of what you read. thus, another purpose of this chapter is to introduce you to some ways of writing about literature that you may find helpful. 
This opening chapter is divided into two parts. first, we considered the pleasures of reading fiction, poetry, and drama - the three literary genres represented in this book. second, we consider some ways of writing about literary works. both of these preliminary discussions are further developed in the chapters devoted to the specific genres and in the book's final part, "research and critical perspectives." 

The Pleasure of poetry

We read poetry for the many pleasures it offers - pleasures of sound and meaning, of image and symbol, of speech and feeling and thought. Some of the pleasures of poetry are intellectual, as when we enjoy a poet's witty wordplay or understand a poem's central idea. Others are emotional, as when a poem evokes sorrow or pity, fear the impulse to tap our feet or nod in time to a poem's rhythmic beat. Emily Dickinson once suggested that she could tell she was reading poetry when she felt as if the top of her head were coming off. Although our own ways of acknowledging the power of poetry may not be as extravagant as Dickinson's, each of us can experience the pleasure of poetry. 

Poems may, at times, seem puzzling or mysterious. Yet mystery and confusion are not essential attributes of poetry. Nor is poetry simply dressed up prose, statements that have been made to look good (by being organized in stanzas) and sound good by (by being arranged in patterns of rhythm and rhyme). Even though we can discuss the ideas in poems, poems can never be reduced to their intellectual content. In reading poetry our experience involves more than considering the meanings of words. It includes our apprehension of a poem's form, our appreciation of its patterns of sound, and our understanding of its thought. The meaning of any poem involves our total experience of reading it, an experience that includes intellectual understanding but which is not restricted to it. 

Poetry sharpens our perception of the world around us since it draws its energy from the fresh observation of life. Poetry can reveal to us things we didn't know or knew only vaguely. It can excite our capacity for wonder, and it can enlarge our appreciation of beauty. It can make us feel more acutely and deeply, and also make us more receptive to the imaginative experience. Reading poetry improves our ability to use and understand language since poems are made of words - at their best, the most carefully chosen words in the best order. Consider the following short poem. 

ROBERT FROST (1874-1963)

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 had rued.  

Part of our enjoyment of this poem comes from its brevity. It captures an experience and re-creates it for us in just a  few words. We may be stuck by the nature of the poem's action - a crow's jouncing a tree limb, which unloads its snow on a man beneath it. We may smile, considering that the crow's action may have been intentional. And we may reflect on the man's response - not anger or frustration, but the shift in his feelings, "a change of mood" (presumably from sorrow to something more joyous, elation perhaps). 

Our pleasure in "Dust of Snow" may include a consideration of our own experience - whether or not that experience duplicates either the poem's external action or the speaker's internal change. We may find ourselves thinking about how our moods change and about what prompts those changes. We may enjoy the surprising reversal of our expectation in reading how Frost's speaker responds to the situation, perhaps comparing what our own imagined response might be. 

These experiential or imaginative pleasures, moreover, might very well be supplemented by the pleasure we take in the poem's sounds - especially its rhythm and rhyme. And they may extend to other details we observe about its structure and language. We may enjoy noticing, for example, that though "Dust of Snow" is a single sentence, it is cast as two separate nearly symmetrical stanzas. And we might ask ourselves how it would differ if arranged as one stanza or constructed of two sentences. Furthermore, we might enjoy Frost's use of "rued," which stands out in a context of more common and familiar language. 

Reading Frost's Poem in Context

"Dust oof Snow" may lead us to speculate not only the narrative incident it recounts but also about the event's larger significance. To what extent, we might ask, does the poem reveal a connection between the human world and the world of nature? To what extent does Frost's little poem seem to suggest that nature can affect the lives of human beings in beneficial ways? Isn't it the crow's action that turns the human speaker's day around, that lifts his spirits?

Asking such questions, we begin to put "Dust of Snow" into larger literary contexts. We put it into the context of literary tradition by linking it with other works that consider the relationship between human beings and nature. These may be other poems by Frost himself, or other poems by his romantic predecessors in England and by contemporaries both in America and elsewhere. 

Reading literary works in context allows us to move beyond details of language and structure, of sound and sense, important as these are, to other larger, broader questions of meaning. Learning to read literature in context can enrich our appreciation of its value.