In White
In White

Summary/Abstract: The two words in the title refer to purity, innocence, Dickinson’s “white election”,anything painterly in that color and, most importantly, snow. It is in fact “pastoral”snow poems that the paper follows, beginning with Dickinson’s “It siftsfrom Leaden Sieves”, back to Emerson’s “The Snow-Storm”, and back to Coleridge’s“Frost at Midnight” and Cowper’s The Task, and forward to Whittier(“Snow-Bound”), Lowell (“The First Snowfall”), and Longfellow (“Snowflakes”and “The Cross of Snow”). The white enclosure, enveloping or folding of thesnow provides the context and backdrop for a series of “narratives” (not all ofthe poems are of this type) focusing on silence, isolation, loneliness, memories,… and death. The themes are often similar, and so are the motifs and images ofthese 19th-century traditionally organized and structured poems. Though RobertFrost himself wrote a couple of pastoral “snow poems” in the twentieth century,“In White” has nothing to do with his poem / variant of the same title.

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