Robert Frost

A Patch of Old Snow

THERE’S a patch of old snow in a corner

Mistaken identity

Frost delays revealing what the patch actually is—we follow his process of misreading the landscape. The poem is about the act of looking, not just what's seen.

That I should have guessed
Was a blow-away paper the rain

Mistaken identity

Frost delays revealing what the patch actually is—we follow his process of misreading the landscape. The poem is about the act of looking, not just what's seen.

Mistaken identity

Frost delays revealing what the patch actually is—we follow his process of misreading the landscape. The poem is about the act of looking, not just what's seen.

Had brought to rest.
It is speckled with grime as if

Small print, grime

Frost compares dirt specks to printed text. This isn't decorative—he's literalizing the idea that nature leaves marks like language does, then immediately undermines it by saying the 'news' is forgotten or unread.

Small print, grime

Frost compares dirt specks to printed text. This isn't decorative—he's literalizing the idea that nature leaves marks like language does, then immediately undermines it by saying the 'news' is forgotten or unread.

Small print overspread it,
The news of a day I’ve forgotten—
If I ever read it.

If I ever read it

The conditional 'if' is crucial. Frost suggests he may never have paid attention in the first place. The poem ends not with forgetting, but with the possibility that nothing was ever registered as worth remembering.

Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

Why Frost chooses the ordinary mistake

This poem's entire argument happens in the first four lines: Frost sees something, misidentifies it, then corrects himself. Most poets would skip the error and describe the snow directly. Frost does the opposite—he makes the mistake the subject. He 'should have guessed' the patch was newspaper, not snow. The verb 'should' is doing real work here: it's not about what he did see, but what he failed to see correctly.

The poem moves from perception to interpretation to acceptance of failure. By the end, Frost isn't just describing a patch of old snow—he's admitting that even when we look directly at something, we might not understand it, and we might not care enough to try. The 'news of a day I've forgotten' could be read as melancholy, but Frost's tone is matter-of-fact. He's not lamenting lost information; he's noting that information passes through us constantly without sticking.

Frost's use of ordinary vision

[CONTEXT: Frost often wrote about rural New England landscapes, but he was deeply skeptical of nature poetry that claimed transcendent meaning.] Notice that Frost never asks us to feel moved by this moment. There's no metaphor about time or mortality stretched across the poem—just a corner, some grime, forgotten news. The specificity of 'a corner' matters: it's not a grand vista, but the kind of detail you'd notice while passing through a yard.

The technical choice here is understatement. A Romantic poet would have made the snow symbolize something. Frost makes it refuse symbolism. When he says 'If I ever read it,' he's not being falsely modest—he's being precise about human attention. We live surrounded by information and beauty that we don't absorb. The poem's power comes from Frost accepting this without complaint or explanation.