Two seemingly unrelated poems can have many surprising similarities despite their obvious contrasting elements. In Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and Edward R. Sill's "Morning," there are no immediately apparent analogous aspects, but after close comparison, one sees the hidden similarities in attitude aside from the contrasts of an old church and a snowy peregrination.

Sill's "Morning" portrays an onlooker watching the events of an old, tradition based church service one early morning. In such a church as this one with its "gloom" and "ghostly shadows that shrank and grew," the immediate tone assumed is somber and dark. The "dim light" and "lichen-stained and gray" chapel along with the congregation listening "without a stir or sound" intensify the dark outlook. The iambic tetrameter only adds a methodical dreariness to the scene. The main character of the poem, it seems, is the monk, who "read...