I meet most Sunday mornings with a group of friends to discuss a book we are all reading.  This morning after we had been reading A gift to Self, a book of poems and stories written by William Stephenson, I remembered a poem by Robert Frost that has probably impressed and perplexed me for longer than any other of his poems or, for that matter, any other bits of writing that I have ever read or had read to me, Frost called this poem, “The Dust of Snow,” which is the third line of the first stanza of the two stanza poem.  Frost wrote the poem after going through what he referred to as the worst night of his life, a night when he was a young farmer in New Hampshire, a night in which one of his children died of flu… 

The discussion today developed into sharing of experiences people had around death… people shared their own experiences surrounding the death of people whom they had loved, and the writer of the book, Bill Stephenson told about what he had learned about himself from his having  been present at the end of life of his patients. Some of his patients had been young and some were old. “The Dust of Snow” is one sentence. The sentence/poem with an AB/AB rhyme scheme is a string of one syllable words except for the word hemlock, the name of a tree with the same name as a classic deadly poison. As I said earlier in this writing, the poem has perplexed and impressed me since Frost himself said it was his favorite poem.

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.