The Onset
The Onset - context Summary
Collected in New Hampshire
Written for Frost’s New Hampshire collection, the poem stages a familiar New England winter moment to meditate on mortality and continuity. A sudden heavy snow momentarily feels like terminal ending, prompting the speaker’s surrender to death and regret at unfinished lives. The poem then counters that impression with the landscape’s resilient rhythm: spring thaw and returning life will dissolve the snow, leaving only small, persistent markers—trees and houses. Frost uses this seasonal cycle to suggest consolation: endings in nature are provisional and embedded in recurring renewal rather than absolute finality.
Read Complete AnalysesALWAYS the same, when on a fated night At last the gathered snow lets down as white As may be in dark woods, and with a song It shall not make again all winter long Of hissing on the yet uncovered ground, I almost stumble looking up and round, As one who overtaken by the end Gives up his errand, and lets death descend Upon him where he is, with nothing done To evil, no important triumph won, More than if life had never been begun. Yet all the precedent is on my side: I know that winter death has never tried The earth but it has failed: the snow may heap In long storms an undrifted four feet deep As measured against maple, birch and oak, It cannot check the peeper’s silver croak; And I shall see the snow all go down hill In water of a slender April rill That flashes tail through last year’s withered brake And dead weeds, like a disappearing snake. Nothing will be left white but here a birch, And there a clump of houses with a church.
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