A comparison of Robert Frost’s poem Dust of Snow to its parody Snow on Frost by Bob McKenty.
This paper analyzes the poem Dust of Snow by Robert Frost. It uses it as an example of how Frost’s poems in general capture a fleeting picture of a natural event and how these events are described in very simple words, without flowery or elaborate language, using plain verse structures. It analyzes the style of the poem stanza by stanza and then compares it to it’s parody, Bob McKenty’s “Snow on Frost” which makes fun of Frost’s earthiness, realism and ironic humor by echoing both Frost’s words and images and the structure of the poem itself.
“In the first stanza, Frost captures a moment that might have been observed while taking a walk in the country in winter. The description is so stripped of detail that it is up to us to visualize the black bird in the dark evergreen tree, dislodging a sprinkling of white snow when it alights or takes off from the branch, perhaps disturbed by the human’s approach. But because the poet specifies that the bird is a crow and the tree is a hemlock, other layers of meaning can be inferred at a symbolic level. The crow is typically seen as a somewhat negative creature (unlike the robin, for example), perhaps even as a bad omen.”