While the imagery and the subject matter of the two poems "Dust of Snow" by Robert Frost and "Night Crow" by Theodore Roethke are similar, the voices of the two poems are very different, with Frost suggesting a moment of reverie and Roethke a sudden and violent connection between poet and scene. Frost's poem is hopeful, affirmative, and satisfying, while Roethke's poem is inconclusive, dark, foreboding, and frustrating, leaving as much unsaid as is said. Both poems show psychological insight into the mind of the poet at the moment depicted in the poem, and the psychology of the two is very different.
Both poems begin with the same image--a crow rising from a tree. In Frost's poem, the time of year is winter, and the crow shakes down snow onto the head of the poet. Frost is very matter-of-fact about the elements in the poem--he names the entities involved without describing them or characterizing them in any way. The crow is a crow, the snow is snow. Only the tree is identified--it is a hemlock tree, a kind of pine. Roethke, on the other hand, characterizes every element--the crow is a "clumsy crow," the tree a "wasted tree." The adjectives he selects makes these entities seem imperfect, and this contributes to the darkness of the vision he creates, much as Frost's approach creates a scene anyone might see. Roethke's vision is more personalized from the start and seems to derive from the turmoil of his own mind more than from the scene before him.
Frost's poem is divided into two parts, while Roethke's is a single line. Both poems constitute the single, unified thought that marks lyric poetry. The division of the poem by Frost serves as a pause between aspects of a single thought. In the first four lines, the event is described. In the second four lines, the result is described. The falling of the snow in the first section leads to the change in mood for the poet in the second section. Roethke's poem is divided b...