Transcendental snowstorm

Ralph Waldo Emerson famously penned verse after verse about the natural world, and "The Snow-Storm" is one of his most famous.  This Emerson classic happens to be the Guardian poem of the week, and Carol Rumens plows through the densely-packed verse with her powerful analysis. She suggests the poem may have been written in response to the English Romantics, and that the "apocalyptic" snow is Emerson's way of blanketing boundaries:

Emerson's poem, for all the sturdy authority of its blank verse, relishes the snow-storm's gothic abandon, its subversive, "savage" disregard for "number or proportion". Nineteenth-century American poets were determined to create a body of literature distinct from that of Europe, and there's a suggestion that the primitive snow-storm could invent shapes at least as interesting as the "slow structures" of deliberate artistry. Conversely, the human architect might, in terms of geological time, amount to no more than a snow-flurry.

Besides enjoying the poem, Rumens also thinks it leaves the reader with morality lessons that only nature can teach:

Emerson was prophetic when he said, "Civilised man has invented the coach, but lost the use of his feet" and, less cheerily, "The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilisation."

Here's the first stanza in all its frosty glory:

The Snow-Storm

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hills and woods, the river and the heaven,
And veils the farmhouse at the garden's end.
The steed and traveler stopped, the courier's feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.

Finish it up at the Guardian...