Nature includes human nature, and both are always “more or less cruel.” The difference between the human and nonhuman world often blurs in Frost’s work in ways that are both comforting and disturbing. In Frost, human consciousness does not alone embrace emotions and moral sensibility, and he explores the relation of our consciousness to that of other species brilliantly in “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things” and also in “Range-Finding” and “The Oven Bird.”

One can see the complexity of his treatment of the relations of man and nonhuman nature in the memorable little poem “Dust of Snow,” originally titled “A Favour.” The sudden disturbance of snow by a crow somehow changes the speaker’s mood, “saving” something from a troubled past. As is the case in almost all Frost’s poetry, the details and the tone demand further attention:

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.

The poem represents a great technical achievement, turning the subject and predicate of a single sentence of mostly monosyllables into a supple rhythmic revelation. It has roundness, closure, and denouement. But Frost had little patience for the kind of pleasure of pure form as an end in itself—what he called “that Beauty is Truth claptrap.” Frost wrote to a friend, “My object is true form—is was and always will be—form true to any chance bit of true life.” In “Dust of Snow,” “true life” remains elusive, if still demanding both the speaker’s and the reader’s interpretation. Here the movement of a black crow disturbs the still blankness of snow. In two other important poems, “The Tuft of Flowers” and “The Wood-Pile,” the sudden flight of a butterfly and a small bird, respectively, signify to observers the portent of a message. In those poems, as in “Dust of Snow,” there is a question of how personally one should take such an event. A crow may have “shook down” the “dust of snow” on the speaker, but was the “way” it happened the result of the crow being scared by the speaker’s presence or part of a process of loosening hemlock seeds to be eaten? The shift in tenses suggests that the change of mood was not immediate. What does venturing into nature teach us? Crow, hemlock (associated with poison), and the analogy of snow and “dust” seem particularly ominous. How could this event save “some part” of a day he had “rued”? Does it recall something bad or preserve a good part of an otherwise intolerable memory?

Frost always enjoyed working within traditions, creating meaning through subtle dialogue with his predecessors. Once asked how he became a poet, Frost replied, “I followed the procession down the ages.” Thomas Hardy’s poem “In a Wood,” for example, provides a similar drama, in which the speaker learns something from nature that makes life more tolerable. And it comes as a surprise that neither nature’s beauty nor its serenity, but its quiet violence, provides some revelation. Hardy knew what Frost knew about the way trees fight: