(Ed note: Earlier this month, our friends over at Ideasmyth ran a series post by poet John Foy. His theme was "braving storms" and the posts were so good we're going to share them with you this week. –sdh)
“Storm Fear” has always been one of my favorite early Robert Frost poems. Like “The Seafarer,” it’s an adversity poem that finds the speaker wondering how he’ll manage as the elements work upon him. In this case, it’s a blizzard at night in the country.
Frost’s deployment of rhymes and iambs was instructive to me early on, showing how a poet who worked in form could modulate into freer-looking verse that used varying line lengths and an irregular though nonetheless tuneful rhyme scheme, all the more lovely and alive because of its unpredictability. This, clearly, was one way to let a poem breathe.