THE BEAUTY OF SNOW. The snow for Whittier is beautiful:
“The old familiar sights of ours
Took marvellous shapes; strange domes and towers
Rose up where sty or corn-crib stood….”
Whittier used Ralph Waldo Emerson’s The Snow-Storm (here) as a prologue to Snow-bound, and Emerson had also marveled at the way that the snow created a beautiful and strange landscape. Steven Burt says that for Emerson, snow is “a kind of Romantic poet, remaking simple New England farms and fences into elaborate shapes”. Emerson’s poem is another of the snow poems that RAB listed, and she commented that the poem “has one of my absolute favorite last lines!”
That last line is indeed wonderful: “The frolic architecture of the snow”.