Daniel Whitehead Hicky's "How Like the Wind" begins with a comparison and then spends fourteen lines proving it. Love, the opening line claims, is like the wind, and "the seeds of love in man" travel the way wind-borne seeds do: lightly, unpredictably, and far beyond the reach of whatever tries to stop them. The poem's central idea is a stubborn kind of hope. Even if mountains collapse and the whole earth burns in "war's finality," something small and living will survive, and when the world is ready again, it will bloom.
What makes this hope convincing is the poem's sense of scale. The first sentence is built from enormous things: mountains cracking into the sea, the earth burning "in one swift horizon." Everest leaves behind a "dark hole" in the sky, and the Apennines, a range that seems permanent, are reduced to "valleys where stood" them. The verbs are past and final. Against all this destruction sits one "lonely seed," and the poem's drama comes from that mismatch. The seed is not heroic or strong. The wind merely "catches" it in its "fingers," a gentle, almost tender image, and carries it "like a trinket." That last word is a surprising choice. A trinket is small, cheap, even trivial, yet it is something one keeps and guards. The poem quietly suggests that love is valued precisely because it is fragile.
The seed is also protected, and the language here is slightly sinister. It is "clasped from the thieves of lightning and of rain." Lightning and rain become robbers, natural forces that would steal the seed's chance of life. The wind plays the opposite role: courier, guardian, accomplice. By the end, the destruction has been absorbed into a larger cycle in which the sea gives up a "continent strange and bare," a blank page for the seed to write on. Nothing in the poem explains why the wind is on love's side. That is part of its quiet confidence: it simply is.
The form supports this patient, unhurried movement. The poem is a sonnet of fourteen lines, a compact container for such a vast subject, and the rhyme scheme (sea, finality; scan; sky, rain, there, and so on) is linked in a way that keeps pulling the sentences forward. The first eight lines run through "sea/finality" and "man/scan," with the rhymes arranged so that the opening comparison and its first conclusion echo each other across the quatrains. The lines are largely iambic pentameter, with a steady, walking rhythm, though the poem loosens that regularity at moments of drama. The long syntax is the real engine: the whole poem is effectively one sustained argument, and the reader is carried along a single breath of thought, much as the seed is carried along the wind. The pause before "And so be carried" and the delay of the main verb "shall blossom" until the final line create real suspense. We wait through the entire catastrophe for the one verb that matters.
The ending also rewards a second look. The final line promises "Roses or pines, like love, shall blossom again," and the word "again" does a great deal of work. It makes the future a repetition of something already known, so that renewal feels less like a miracle than like a law. The choice of "roses or of pines" is telling too. One is a flower associated with love, the other an evergreen, a tree that stays green through winter. Between them they cover tenderness and endurance, the two qualities the poem wants to attribute to love.
The poem's significance lies in how it handles an old consolation without sentimentality. It does not deny destruction; it describes it at great length and with real force. But it places its faith in the smallest possible thing, and it grounds that faith in an image any reader can picture, a seed drifting on a gust. The result is a poem that is at once about the end of the world and about the stubbornness of life, and it leaves the reader with the sense that the second thing is the larger.