Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1865

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

For the contemporary ear, the strict rhyming form and carefully measured meter of Snow-Bound can be off-putting, even intimidating, given the poem’s epical length. The wall-of-sound effect, close to 800 lines of tightly measured beat and strict end rhymes, comes from Whittier’s passionate embrace of British metrics and his belief, like all of the Boston-based Fireside Poets, that American poetry, to be regarded as literary in merit, should scrupulously follow the inherited patterns of poetry.

The lines are iambic pentameter, a traditional device in long narrative poetry that dates back to Elizabethan England. There are five beats to each line with a pattern of a short stress followed by a long stress. For instance, Line 47, which recalls the first glimpse of the farm the first morning of the storm: “We looked upon a world unknown.” Read aloud, that pattern, at once stately and cadenced, followed so carefully for hundreds of lines, becomes hypnotic, the beat at times overwhelming the words themselves. In addition, the poem creates meter through the use of rhyming couplets, a device that traditionally aided in the memorization and public recitation of long poems. Across 759 lines, these rhymes, sometimes subtle, sometimes obvious, always clever and even sneaky, reveal Whittier’s deft command of language itself. Although, much as the poetry Whittier admired, most notably the verse essays of Alexander Pope and the philosophical nature poetry of William Wordsworth, the rhythm and rhyme schemes are varied at critical points to enhance the aural effect.

Narrative Voice

Because of the extensive prefatory notes Whittier prepared for the original publication of the poem in 1866, there is no doubt he is narrator of the poem. This is his recollection of a specific event from his childhood on the farm where he grew up in Haverhill, Massachusetts. The characters are actually recollected members of his family, the boarders reflect two visitors that indeed were marooned with the family, the local schoolteacher and an itinerant preacher. Snow-Bound thus is a narrative, or more precisely, a nested narrative, that is a gathering of many unrelated stories, some vivid and quite exciting, others more lyrical and descriptive. Little actually happens in the narrative present, save Whittier approaching 60, weary of a long and bitter war that divided the nation he loved in its efforts at last to end the immorality of slavery, now looking back fondly on a memory he cherishes. That is the entire action of the narrative present: A man thinks back. To borrow from the poet’s own metaphor from the closing, the narrative present is akin to watching someone appreciate a painting in an art gallery.

The stories related around the hearth during the storm establish a feeling of comfort and closeness. Whittier draws on what has been the source of the power of storytelling since Antiquity, its power to create community in a difficult and trying time. The stories themselves reflect an idealized vision of the virtues of an American generation all but gone, sturdy in character, moral, in tune with the land, hardworking, and independent. It is the point of the preacher’s remarks that she fears as she tirelessly works the backroads of Massachusetts that this moral integrity is quickly vanishing. The narrative voice uses the frame to create the nostalgic tone of the poem by suggesting the moral value of this lost generation.

Figurative Language

Whittier as narrator perceives himself to be a poet. That is an important and critical distinction. As with all of the Fireside Poets, Whittier writes in what he conceives to be the public voice appropriate to the august position of The Poet, capital T, capital P. Despite the personal nature of the reminiscences and the emotional moments when Whittier recalls the deaths of members of his own family, the voice is never confessional or intimate. This is a public poem. The vocabulary is thus erudite, learned, and heightened. The richly detailed descriptions of the storm and the farmhouse are realized through literary devices that call attention to the written-ness of the poem.

The lines are rich with literary allusions, most notably from Scripture, and from Greek and Roman history and mythology, and are sustained by the poet’s evident delight in figurative language—similes and metaphors—devices that again call attention to the cleverness and originality of the poet. The figurative language heightens the appreciation and admiration of the poet as craftsman. The branches sway as if they are “blind”; the “great throat” of the chimney “laughed” (164); the partridge “drummed” in the woods (341); the cows in the barn waiting to be milked are “prisoned brutes” (82); the drifts of snow rival the Leaning Tower of Pisa; an old horned sheep, waiting to be fed, raises its head like Amun, the Egyptian god of the sun (90); stars wait, trees kneel, wind mourns, cows ponder. Ironically, the poem, cased in the eloquent and learned voice of the well-read poet and decorated with such elaborate figurative devices, would certainly baffle the simple homespun frontier people it hymns.