SOURCE: Davis, William V. “Silence in the Snowy Fields and This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years.” In Understanding Robert Bly, pp. 17-42. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988.

In the following excerpt, Davis offers an overview of the poems in Silence in the Snowy Fields and This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years, comparing the collections structurally and thematically, and maintaining that they adumbrate the important ideas and images Bly addressed throughout his career.

Silence in the Snowy Fields consists of forty-four short, often perplexingly simple, lyric poems. Bly's epigraph to the book, “We are all asleep in the outward man,” is taken from Boehme and it suggests both the thematic thrust of the book and the structural arrangement Bly follows. The book is divided into three sections and moves from “eleven poems of solitude,” through an “awakening,” to an opening out, a...