The Full Text of “Dust of Snow”
1The way a crow
2Shook down on me
3The dust of snow
4From a hemlock tree
5Has given my heart
6A change of mood
7And saved some part
8Of a day I had rued.
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“Dust of Snow” Introduction
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"Dust of Snow" is a short poem by Robert Frost, published in the Pulitzer Prize-winning volume New Hampshire (1923). The poem's speaker, possibly the poet himself, is initially unhappy. But a sprinkling of snow, dislodged by a crow in the tree above the speaker, brings an element of surprise that partly "save[s]" the speaker's bad day. The poem thus shows how nature can lift people's mood, if only temporarily.
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“Dust of Snow” Summary
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The specific way in which a crow caused a sprinkle of snow to fall on me from a hemlock tree (a kind of evergreen pine) has lifted my spirits for the better, and redeemed part of a day that I had come to regret.
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“Dust of Snow” Themes
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Humanity and the Natural World
“Dust of Snow” shows how nature can cheer people up by putting their problems in perspective and reminding them of the world outside their own heads. But rather than staging this idea as some grand revelation, this poem depicts it on a smaller, funnier, more relatable scale: a crow in a hemlock tree shakes snow down onto the passing speaker, in a surprise that seems to lighten the day’s troubles.
The poem leaves much unsaid, but the speaker clearly sees this dust of snow as significant. This suggests that, even in its smallest actions, nature has something to teach humanity—if perhaps only through its indifference to human problems!
The speaker had "rued" (that is, bitterly regretted or resented) the day prior to this dusting. The speaker could just be having a bad day or could be experiencing something more profoundly upsetting. Either way, nature finds a way to put these bad feelings into perspective.
When the crow shakes snow down onto the speaker, it’s like a cold shock of reality. It's almost as if the crow knew this was what the speaker needed (though, of course, it didn't!). The fact that the crow—and nature more generally—doesn't tiptoe around the speaker's bad mood reframes that mood as less important. The crow's timing is so comically perfect that it pulls the speaker out of this funk, almost as if to tell the speaker to stop worrying and look at the beauty around them.
It's not just the snow itself that "save[s]" the speaker's day, either. It's "the way" the crow makes it fall. Nature, here, is a series of actions and reactions, a system of interconnected parts. And while the event in the poem seems trivial, it links four of those parts together: the snow, the tree, the crow, and the speaker. The sudden snow thus might remind the speaker that they’re part of something larger than themselves—and that their problems are small in the grand scheme of things.
That this event cheers the speaker up is amusingly ironic. Crows are often seen as bad omens, but here it's almost as if the crow has a sense of comic timing, shaking down snow just when the speaker needs it most. Rather than foreshadowing death, the crow affirms life. And rather than finding the snow-dusting unpleasant, the speaker finds it refreshing.
Still, the poem doesn't sentimentalize or exaggerate the impact of this moment. The speaker doesn't make a sweeping statement about nature's ability to save people—just an observation about how it can sometimes, in a small yet significant way, make someone feel better. (And here, perhaps, it improves the speaker's outlook by providing inspiration for this very poem.) The reader never learns what's behind the speaker's mood, just that it’s temporarily brightened by the natural world.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Dust of Snow”
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Lines 1-2
The way a crow
Shook down on meThe poem jumps right in without any scene-setting, unfolding in a single sentence enjambed across eight lines. This structure gives the poem tension and an element of surprise, which subtly mirrors the speaker's pleasant surprise at the "dust of snow."
The poem begins with the image of a crow. Crows can be symbolically associated with death, so the first line seems as if it might signal some grim content to follow. But the focus is on "the way" the crow does something, not the crow itself. That is, it's the manner and timing with which the crow performs the poem's main action that so affects the speaker. (As it turns out, this poem is all about timing. The speaker was in a bad mood, and this crow, by sheer chance, was in the right place at the right time to help.)
The first two lines also juxtapose the "crow" with the human speaker ("me"), setting up a subtle contrast between the instinct-driven natural world and the complex interior of the speaker's mind. As the reader learns at the end, the speaker has been lost in thought, "rue[ing]" the day for an unspecified reason. Meanwhile, the crow is just going about its business, unconcerned by the turmoil of human emotion.
Consonance links the hard /c/ sounds at the beginning of "crow" and the end of "Shook," with the harsh repetition perhaps evoking the jostling of the tree. The four /o/ sounds in "crow / Shook down on" are all slightly different, so they're not quite assonant, but the shared vowel links the words visually, making the image more cohesive.
Grammatically, though, the poem is up in the air. A main verb still awaits, as does the object of the verb "Shook down," so for a moment, the reader can only process the few elements that are there. This suspenseful syntax (with the suspense drawn out by line breaks) helps grab the reader's interest and maintain it throughout the poem.
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Lines 3-4
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
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Lines 5-8
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.
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“Dust of Snow” Symbols
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The Crow
Crows can symbolize many different things in different cultures, but in English-language literary tradition they tend to represent something sinister: bad luck, evil, and/or death. Though it's not quite the same bird, think of how the raven in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" functions as a harbinger of loss and sorrow. Crows are scavenging birds, which may explain their association with death.
Here, though, the crow has a positive effect. It's possible that the crow's symbolic link with death (reinforced by the chill of snow) lifts the speaker's mood by reminding them to appreciate life. But it's more likely that the crow stands in for the natural world in general.
Through the speaker's accidental interaction with the crow, the poem juxtaposes human emotional turmoil with the more instinctive and indifferent behaviors of nature. It shows that human worries don't matter much in the larger scheme of things. The crow's otherness, not its ominousness, is perhaps what gladdens the speaker's "heart."
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Snow
Snow often symbolizes purity and renewal, and in way that's what's going on here. Think of snow's real-world ability to transform a landscape. In the poem, that transformative power is applied to the speaker's mood: the snow's cold shock wakes the speaker out a stupor and redeems "some part" of a bad day. It's as if the snow is a fairy dust (and "dust" is the word choice in line 3) that magically refreshes the speaker's perspective.
More generally, the snow, like the crow, represents the non-human natural world. The speaker's comically timed interaction with nature places their troubles in a wider context. The snow thus speaks to nature's capacity to brighten people's moods and to remind them that they're part of something larger.
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“Dust of Snow” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
Alliteration plays a minor role in "Dust of Snow," mainly underscoring connections between the poem's different elements.
For example, the /d/ in "down" (line 2) and "dust" (line 3) connects the crow's action with the snow, via a hard consonant whose repetition helps evoke the shaking of the tree branch. The /h/ in "hemlock," "has," and "heart" (lines 4-5) connects the tree (and the falling snow) with the speaker's internal state. The surprise of the falling snow perhaps reminds the speaker of their humble place in the world, making life's troubles seem (temporarily) less significant and giving them "a change of mood."
Alliteration in line 7—"saved some part"—ties in with the poem's earlier sibilance in line 3's "dust of snow." The cold snow refreshes the speaker, disrupting the focus on negative emotions. The /s/ captures this invigorating effect, standing out among the poem's other sounds; it's also a soft consonant that helps suggest the gentle dusting of snow. More subtly, it connects salvation (of "some part" of the speaker's day) with the image of the snow itself.
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Consonance
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Enjambment
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Irony
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Juxtaposition
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“Dust of Snow” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Hemlock Tree
- Rued
Hemlock Tree-
Hemlocks are tall trees with soft needles, native to New Hampshire.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Dust of Snow”
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Form
"Dust of Snow" consists of two quatrains, or four-line stanzas. The poem is enjambed throughout so that the quatrains form one continuous sentence.
The division of stanzas lends an element of tension and surprise. Looking only at the first stanza, the reader might detect an ominous atmosphere. But like the "dust of snow" that falls on the speaker, the second stanza refreshes and reframes what has come before. The division into two stanzas thus marks out the speaker's two different moods.
The simplicity of the poem's form suggests that it isn't a grand, sweeping statement about humanity and nature. It shows nature providing the speaker with a moment of uplift, but it doesn't pretend that everything has suddenly changed for the better.
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Meter
"Dust of Snow" uses iambic dimeter: two feet per line of unstressed-stressed syllables (da-DUM). Here are the first two lines as an example:
The way | a crow
Shook down | on meThe poem uses continual enjambment to spread its single long sentence over eight short lines. The flow of the meter in line 2—"Shook down"—seems to emphasize the downward motion of the falling snow.
The simplicity of the meter makes the poem feel straightforward and to the point. Nothing major happens, and there is no huge revelation. Much is left up to the reader's interpretation. But the dimeter feels light and unhurried, with an occasional extra unstressed syllable (e.g., "a" in "From a hemlock tree") adding a jaunty "swing" to the rhythm and capturing the speaker's shift toward a positive emotion.
The short lines also assign everything in the first stanza its particular place, stressing a different element of the scene at the end of each line: line 1 = the crow, line 2 = the speaker, line 3 = the snow, line 4 = the hemlock tree. This gives the poem a haiku-like clarity while showing how these four elements are, through one mini-event, all connected.
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Rhyme Scheme
"Dust of Snow" uses the following rhyme scheme:
ABAB CDCD
This simple pattern speaks to the simplicity, but also the interconnectedness, of the scene being described. A crow in a tree shakes some snow down onto the speaker—that's all that actually happens in the poem. But the comic timing of this event seems perfect, as if the crow knows the speaker needs a dose of snow to shake up a bad day. The rhymes make everything feel as if it's in its right place, coming together at just the right time. The four nouns rhymed together in the first stanza—"crow," "me," "snow," "tree"—all intersect in this one small moment of change.
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“Dust of Snow” Speaker
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"Dust of Snow" has a first-person speaker, but the reader doesn't learn much about them. These are the facts:
- The speaker was in a bad mood ("had rued" the day), but it's impossible to say how bad. This could be passing annoyance or part of a deeper depression.
- The spell of this bad mood was broken by the cold "dust of snow." The way the crow made it fall—at just the right time, almost as if on purpose—lifted the speaker's spirits.
- But how long this positive effect lasts is uncertain. The speaker states that only "some part" of the day has been "saved," implying that another part is irrevocably lost.
It's tempting to read the speaker as Frost himself. The poem comes from his 1923 collection New Hampshire, and hemlock trees (see line 4) are common in that state, where Frost lived for many years. Perhaps, then, part of the day is saved because the crow's action provides the spark for this little poem!
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“Dust of Snow” Setting
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The poem paints a pretty austere winter scene, particularly in the first stanza. There are three details that relate to the setting: the "crow," the "dust of snow," and the "hemlock tree." The setting could be New Hampshire, given that this appears in Frost's 1923 collection of the same name and that hemlock trees are common in the state. But readers don't know for sure: the poem is intentionally minimalist, which prevents it from being overblown. (The little shock of snow saves some part of the speaker's day, but it doesn't necessarily have a long-lasting effect.)
The setting does, however, emphasize nature's ability to improve people's moods. The speaker, probably out for a walk, gets a reminder of the world taking place beyond the turmoil of human emotions. Nature, then, becomes a literal and metaphorical escape, however brief.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Dust of Snow”
- The first section comprises mainly long-form poems, including the titular "New Hampshire," while the second section features shorter, pithier poems.
- "Dust of Snow" appears in the second section and showcases Frost's ability to pare a poem down to its starkest elements. "Fire and Ice" provides another great example of the same approach. These shorter lyric poems have generally remained more popular than the longer blank verse poems in the other section.
Literary Context
"Dust of Snow" was published in Robert Frost's fourth collection, New Hampshire (1923). The book was a critical and commercial success and contains some of his best-known poems, including "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "Fire and Ice," and "Nothing Gold Can Stay." It's divided into two sections relating to musical terminology: "Notes" and "Grace Notes":
"Dust of Snow" is typical of Frost in its focus on the natural world. Unlike the Romantic poets of the 19th century, Frost rarely overstates nature's positive attributes. For him, nature can modify and intensify people's interior states—but also act as an indifferent presence in human life, undermining people's hopes and cares. Here, that indifference has a positive, amusing effect. But in other poems, like "The Sound of the Trees," nature can make people feel more isolated and desperate.
In its indirect way, the poem plays with literary associations. Crows are bad omens or symbols of death in some folklore and mythology, while the word "hemlock" will make many readers think of Socrates's execution by poisoning. Here, though, the crow and the tree (which is non-toxic; the hemlock shrub is the killer) unwittingly join forces to affirm life rather than threaten it. When "Dust of Snow" was first published, it was titled "A Favour"—emphasizing the way the crow does the speaker a favor by sending down that cold, refreshing snow.
Historical Context
"Dust of Snow" was written not long after the First World War, an event that shook humanity to its core. Frost's poems during this period don't usually mention the war directly (apart from one addressed to Edward Thomas in New Hampshire), but the sobering mood of the immediate postwar years can be felt in much of his postwar work. For example, the first section of New Hampshire ends with the lines: "Since man began / To drag down man / And nation nation."
Frost didn't serve in the war, instead working as a teacher and living in England for a time in hopes of advancing his literary career. He moved back to America in 1915 and settled in New Hampshire (where hemlock trees are common and crows can be found in the woods in winter).
The 1920s marked a meteoric rise in Frost's career. New Hampshire won him the first of his four Pulitzer Prizes and brought his work to a wide audience. Meanwhile, the decade, after its war-shaken beginnings, became a period of economic prosperity and optimism—at least until the Great Depression ended it. But Frost tends to avoid topical specifics in his poetry and focuses primarily on rural America. (The so-called Roaring Twenties was mostly an urban phenomenon.) "Dust of Snow" is no exception: it depicts a rural scene that carries emotional resonance, but doesn't engage directly with broader social or historical trends.
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More “Dust of Snow” Resources
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External Resources
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The Poem Out Loud — A reading of "Dust of Snow."
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Frost at Home — A 1952 interview with the poet himself.
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New Hampshire (Full Text) — A full text of the collection in which "Dust of Snow" originally appeared.
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A Biography of the Poet — Read about Frost's life and work at the Poetry Foundation.
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"A Lover's Quarrel with the World" — A documentary about Frost's remarkable career.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Robert Frost
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