lack of feeling, or even his pleasure in the remote suffering of others. The news messenger is the first to convey this “cold and yet cheerful” attitude: “Messenger of grief / Perhaps to thousands, and of joy to some, / To him indifferent whether grief or joy.”15 For the recipient of the newspaper, the primary emotion is pleasurable curiosity. He looks forward to “wheel[ing] the sofa round” in front of the fire, “clos[ing] the shutters fast,” and vicariously experiencing the world’s news: “Is India free? And does she wear her plumed / And jeweled turban with a smile of peace, / Or do we grind her still?”16 Rather than contemplating the suffering of others, the speaker makes his subject his own vicarious emotions, strangely removed from the terrors he contemplates: “I behold the tumult and am still. The sound of war / Has lost its terrors ere it reaches me. Grieves but alarms me not.”17
However “pleasant” it is “through the loop-holes of retreat to peep at such a world,” the pleasure is accompanied by a sense of dislocated dread that emerges in the speaker’s depiction of the snow.18 After meditating on the news extensively, the speaker shifts his attention to the weather outside his window. There a transformation takes place that echoes the numbing of emotion that a mediated depiction of current events brings the newspaper reader:
Tomorrow brings a change, a total change!
Which even now, though silently perform’d
And slowly, and by most unfelt, the face
Of universal nature undergoes.19
“The face of universal nature undergoes” a smoothing of expression, an erasure of feeling, a transformation into blankness and indifference that marks and mirrors the unconscious horror of the comfortable reader in his unfeeling reception of the pain of others. However unconscious one is of current events, a change occurs that surpasses understanding and awareness; via the figure of snow, Cowper comments on the strangeness of this new world where war can lose its terrors in transmission.
Cowper’s “Winter Evening” left its mark on the American snow poems that followed in its wake. Before the Civil War, New England writers in particular took up the figure of snow in order to define an aesthetic indigenous to the region and the new nation. To do so, they implicitly contrasted Cowper’s comfortable fireside scene of contemplation with American poets who walk outside into the storm and experience the weather more directly. Emerson’s 1835 “The Snow-Storm” is a touchstone in this collective endeavor. Echoing Cowper’s poem in order to counter it, Emerson casts the north wind as a barbaric artist that, through the medium of snow, transforms the world into a whimsical architectural wonderland while people huddle together inside a farmhouse. His poem, like Cowper’s, starts with heraldic imagery of sounding horns; but whereas Cowper’s horns signal the arrival of a news carrier, Emerson’s trumpets are “of the sky.” The storm itself is the news rather than the impediment to the transmission of information, and it announces its own arrival:
Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hill and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farmhouse at the garden’s end.
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier’s feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.
Come see the north wind’s masonry.
Out of an unseen quarry evermore
Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer
Curves his white bastions with projected roof
Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.
Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work
So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he
For number or proportion. Mockingly,
On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;
A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn;
Fills up the farmer’s lane from wall to wall,
Maugre the farmer’s sighs; and at the gate
A tapering turret overtops the work.
And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind’s night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.20
Emerson briskly condenses Cowper’s elaborate fireside scenario into three lines. “Enclosed / In a tumultuous privacy of storm,” the “housemates” are extraneous rather than central to the poem’s drama. The “mad night wind” replaces the contemplative patriarch in Cowper’s poem as the central agent. Enough traces of the distant wars underpinning Cowper’s meditation remain in Emerson’s poem to signal their active erasure. The wind’s transformation of the landscape is cast in militaristic terms: “trumpets of the sky” herald its arrival, and it quickly wrests the land from its human inhabitants, imprisons them indoors, and lays waste, albeit temporarily and playfully, to the competitors’ territory. Emerson has imported war’s energies into the metaphorical realm of art, purging them of tragic, literal associations so that they may serve to renovate and liberate the imagination.
The intense political discord that culminated in the U.S. Civil War rendered this liberation of the imagination from material circumstances and political exigencies obsolete almost as soon as it was formulated. Many writers of the ’50s and ’60s—including Emerson, eventually—returned to the question of poetry’s social responsibility, particularly to address the question of slavery and the possibility, and then reality, of civil war. This is Elizabeth Akers Allen’s starting point in “Snow,” published in the Atlantic Monthly, one of the leading pro-Union periodicals, in February 1864, after the battles of Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, Chickamauga, and others had claimed tens of thousands of lives.21 A prolific and popular poet who was perhaps better known under her pen name Florence Percy, Allen published poems in periodicals throughout the war; her “Rock Me to Sleep” was one of the most popular poems to emerge from the war years.22 She marked the climate of the conflict through the changing seasons in poems such as “Spring at the Capital,” in which the speaker imagines seeing blood on white flowers after looking at a “white encampment” in the distance, outside of Washington DC.23 Explicitly working from formally experimental predecessors, both Emerson’s “Snow-Storm” and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Snow-Flakes” of 1858, in “Snow” Allen smooths, tames, and shapes their work into tetrameter lines, balanced between iambs and trochees, with an unbroken abaab rhyme scheme. She revises Emerson’s depicted scenario as well, by putting things in their place:
Lo, what wonders the day hath brought,
Born of the soft and slumberous snow!
