as an artist, thought by thought,
Writes expression on lip and brow.
Hanging garlands the eaves o’erbrim,
Deep drifts smother the paths below;
The elms are shrouded, trunk and limb,
And all the air is dizzy and dim
With a whirl of dancing, dazzling snow.
So much for Emerson’s mad wind’s unruly disruption; we seem to have a highly conservative poet here, one who seeks to make her own poem a proper counterpoint to Emerson’s by offering a tidied version of the farm scene that his night wind messed up. Allen’s “soft and slumberous” snow hangs “garlands,” not on chicken coops and dog kennels, but appropriately, on the eaves of a house. Her snow etches an analogous double of the human gradually, silently, and slowly, “Even as an artist, thought by thought / Writes expression on lip and brow.” Less wildly ambivalent and unsettling than Emerson’s poem, Allen’s first stanzas personify nature so fully that he only knows how to sculpt a form as a human artist would. Harnessing and stabilizing Emerson’s night wind’s myriad-handed work, Allen’s poem gives the impression of reaching a conclusion by the end of the second stanza of a six-stanza poem.
A first hint of the return of war from its banishment to metaphor in Emerson’s earlier poem is the comparison of the snow to an artist who “writes expression on lip and brow”; the snow portrait recalls Cowper’s “universal face” from a “Winter’s Evening,” registering a displaced awareness of the numbness inflicted by the remote reception of violence. Upon consideration, the second stanza does not seem so cheery after all: the “dancing, dazzling snow” recedes, and Allen sketches a much starker picture. The “deep drifts smother the paths,” “the elms are shrouded, trunk and limb,” and even the air, “dizzy and dim,” seems unable to breathe. The poem takes a dark turn from there, beyond stasis to death and even killing. Allen’s poem, which at first dramatized the evasion of current events, becomes gripped by them; the whimsical scene of exterior decoration, fully evocative of Emerson’s earlier poem, warps into a nightmare vision in the next three stanzas:
Dimly out of the baffled sight
Houses and church-spires stretch away;
The trees, all spectral and still and white,
Stand up like ghosts in the failing light,
And fade and faint with the blinded day.
Down from the roofs in gusts are hurled
The eddying drifts to the waste below;
And still is the banner of storm unfurled,
Till all the drowned and desolate world
Lies dumb and white in a trance of snow.
Slowly the shadows gather and fall,
Still the whispering snow-flakes beat;
Night and darkness are over all:
Rest, pale city, beneath their pall!
Sleep, white world, in thy winding-sheet!
The violence continues “Till all the drowned and desolate world / Lies dumb and white in a trance of snow.” Rather than covering to re-create, like Emerson’s night wind, this windless snow smothers to kill, “hurls downward” to make and join “waste.” Allen depicts a total annihilation that wraps the entire world in a winding sheet. Her apocalyptic, depopulated poetic landscape supplants Emerson’s animating personifications.
The Civil War is the not-so-hidden subtext, disrupting the Emersonian aesthetic in which the imagination is free to remake the world in its own image without damage or cost. If we need more evidence, beyond the snow “hurled” down like missiles and laying “waste,” we might notice the corpselike description of the elms whose articulated parts, “trunk and limb,” summon the amputation and dismemberment so ubiquitous during the war. The “banner of storm,” stridently patriotic in its unrelenting demands, insists on continuing its siege until the entire “pale city” is buried in a single “winding-sheet” (the Civil War dead, especially regular infantry, were frequently buried in mass graves or left to the elements).24
The speaker can still talk after the whole world has been destroyed, because, like Emerson’s “housemates,” she has sought shelter out of the storm in a room. Instead of Cowper’s comforting fire, Allen’s speaker stares at a picture of Rome and a wreath on her wall. Here the war surfaces fully as the subject of the poem, and the weather metaphor recedes:
Clouds may thicken, and storm-winds breathe:
On my wall is a glimpse of Rome;—
Land of my longing!—and underneath
Swings and trembles my olive-wreath;
Peace and I are at home, at home!
Shut in, a lone survivor, the speaker turns away from the present toward the ancient history of civilization in order to imagine a place “at home, at home” with peace. Even that dislocation from the natural world and the present moment, however, does not keep the threat of destruction at bay, for the very place she looks to reassure herself of the rise of civilization has fallen, as a result of war. The late eighteenth-century English historian Edward Gibbon famously attributed the “decline and fall of the Roman Empire” to barbarian invasions that were possible due to the loss of civic virtue.25 Allen’s snow actively recalls Emerson’s frolic savagery in order to obliterate it, suggesting that poets, or at least her poem, can no longer use the natural world as a playground where the imagination is free to roam. The snow imposes a vision of mass death upon the speaker in spite of herself, one she seeks to escape. Bunkered in her home, she assembles pieces into a collage-like figure of a shrine—a picture of Rome in place of the world outside her window, an olive-wreath beneath—shoring up fragments in a vain attempt to look elsewhere and see differently. The weather brought the news home to the speaker, who invokes peace as a desperate plea in response.
To distill a difference between the antebellum aesthetics of Emerson and the “bellum” aesthetics of Allen, we might say that the work of a creative imagination transforming the world has been replaced by the grimmer task of picking up the pieces and trying to construct something out of what seems like nothing. Emily Dickinson’s Poem #291B both validates and develops this distinction, echoing many of the images discussed thus far.
It sifts from Leaden Sieves –
It powders all the Field –
It fills with Alabaster Wool
The Wrinkles of the Road –
It makes an even face
Of Mountain – and of Plain –
Unbroken Forehead from the East
Unto the East – again –
It reaches to the Fence –
It wraps it, Rail by Rail,
Till it is lost in Fleeces –
It flings a Crystal Vail
On
