Anyone who has watched an orchard overnight knows the small shock Smithdas captures in his opening lines: yesterday the branches were bare, and today they are white. "Forecast" turns that ordinary surprise into something stranger. The blossoms on the apple trees, it turns out, are not blossoms at all, or not quite. They are "sculped by wind from fallen snow and frost." What looks like the arrival of spring is winter wearing spring's clothes, and the poem's central idea grows out of that double nature: the cold can carry a promise, and a promise can carry a grief.
The title does a great deal of quiet work here. A forecast looks forward, yet the poem ends by looking back, and the two directions are held together in its final line. The frozen flowers each hold "a coming prophecy / Of brighter suns and laughing April showers," but they also hold "the remembered glory of Springs lost." So the same white petals point ahead to the real spring and behind to every spring already gone. The poem is about anticipation and loss in a single gesture, and it never lets the speaker settle into pure hope or pure sorrow.
The form supports that balance. This is a sonnet, split into an octave and a sestet, and the turn arrives exactly where tradition expects it, at the start of the ninth line with the word "But." Before it, the speaker marvels at the sudden beauty; after it, he qualifies the marvel, admitting that this spring is "strangely cold and gleaming." The rhyme scheme of the octave, ABBA ABBA (drest / white / overnight / rest, then prest / light / flight / West), is tight and enclosed, and it fits an orchard where everything seems wrapped in the same glittering stillness. The sestet loosens into a new pattern, CDECDE (tree / flowers / frost / prophecy / showers / lost), and the rhymes begin to travel farther from each other, so that "frost" and "lost" close the poem on a long, falling echo. The meter is a steady iambic pentameter, and Smithdas lets it run smoothly, which makes the odd image at the center of the poem feel calm rather than alarming.
The imagery is where the poem is at its most inventive. In the first quatrain the bare trees are given hands: "their naked fingers prest / Against a hostile sky of winter light." The verb "prest" is slightly archaic, and so is the spelling of "drest," giving the whole poem a faintly antique, formal air, as though spring itself were being addressed in an older register. The fingers stretch up "as if to touch the waning sun in flight, / Or gather a few embers from the West." That second image is lovely and a little sad: the trees are imagined as poor travelers warming their hands at the last coals of a fire. Fire and ice then trade places in the second stanza, because the "embers" the trees reached for are answered by blossoms made of snow. The branches wanted warmth and were given something that only looks like light.
Word choice sharpens the effect. "Resplendently" is a grand, glittering adverb, and "silver-white" suggests metal as much as petal; both prepare us for the revelation that these flowers are not soft and living but "sculped," a word borrowed from stone and marble. A sculpture is made, shaped by a hand or, here, by the wind, and it keeps its shape without being alive. That is the poem's quiet unease: the beauty is real, yet it is the beauty of an artifact. The word "enchants" fits too, since enchantment is a spell, and spells are not the same as the natural thing.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it refuses an easy moral. It could have said simply that winter always yields to spring. Instead it admits that the false spring remembers true springs and cannot be one of them, and it lets the speaker take comfort and ache from the same sight. In fourteen lines, a frosted tree becomes a small, exact picture of how hope and memory sit side by side.