Once long ago, when in fact we were living down in the middle of Connecticut, there came a rather big snowstorm in the middle of April and that begot this poem. So, it's... it's a poem about how it is when you get a snowstorm when you hadn't expected it. It's also, I think, in the broadest way a poem about how to die so as to go on living.

A Storm in April

Some winters, taking leave
Deal us a last, hard blow,
Salting the ground like Carthage
Before they will go.
But the bright, milling snow
Which throngs the air today -
It is a way of leaving
So as to stay.
The light flakes do not weigh
The willows down, but sift
Through the white catkins loose
As petal-drift,
Or in an up-draft lift
And glitter at a height,
Dazzling as summers leaf stir
Chinked with light.
This storm, if I am right,
Will not be wholly over
Till green fields, here and there
Turn white with clover,
And through chill air, the puffs of milkweed hover.

'Hover' is not a pure rhyme with 'clover', but I like the way it works anyway. The... I remember Wilbert Snow, a Connecticut poet who also was on the Wesleyan faculty for a time and who before that had been lieutenant governor of the State, saying to me about the, the rhyme scheme of this poem that it was as difficult as Frost's rhyme scheme in Stopping By Woods, and he said, 'You just got out of that with your honour.'