43 pages • 1 hour read
John Greenleaf WhittierSnow-Bound: A Winter Idyl
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1865A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Blizzard
The nor’easter that buries the farmhouse and then maroons the family and friends of the young poet for a week symbolizes the urgent and immediate power of nature. To America in the mid-19th century, nature was not some abstract symbolic environment. Nature was real and pressing and still literally all around a nation that was just beginning the move toward domesticating nature and becoming industrialized. Thus, the depiction here of the fierce storm taps into that sense of nature as a terror; magnificent, perhaps, but a terror, nonetheless.
The snowstorm transfigures the farmyard. The poet recalls being dazzled the morning the snow finally lets up by how different the world appears now that it is buried under yards of immaculate fresh snow. If, as the storm descends, the farm family feels claustrophobic fears as they listen to the howling winds and the numbing cold, if the storm creates a sense of vulnerability and helplessness, the storm also reconfigures the world, and elicits from the poet-narrator a giddy response as “the old familiar sights of ours / Took marvelous shapes; strange dome and towers / Rose up where sty or corn-crib stood” (54-55).
More than the power and beauty of nature, the snowstorm serves as a moral teacher. It invites thought, rewards reflection. Nature provides lessons. The experience of the blizzard helps the adult poet who narrates the poem to understand the concepts of mutability, loss, the power of family and friends, and ultimately death itself. That is the real power of the storm.
The Hearth Fire
The hearth fire symbolizes the warmth and conviviality of humanity at its best. Whittier recalls how even as a boy he felt the comfort of the hearth. Against the terrifying power and the bitter cold of the snowstorm, Whittier juxtaposes the roaring fire that “[b]urst, flower-like, into rosy bloom” (131), its fierce gleam caught by the “whitewashed walls and sagging beams” (129). The fire converts the drab and chilly farmhouse kitchen into a convivial and comfortable oasis in the storm around which gather the Whittier family and their friends to share rich food and animated conversation. No one is going to freeze to death. No one is going to starve. “What matter how the night behaved?” (175), the poet asks, underscoring the feeling of security.
The hearth fire symbolizes the power of community, the consolation of family and friends joining without rancor, without complaining about conditions, and without judgment. The hearth is a manifestation of consanquinity, the Romantic idea that the earth and its people were a single great cooperative organism. The idea of community surely resonated with particular power for Whittier’s own audience, a nation recovering from four years of civil war. The blazing hearth fire offers the family and friends the chance to exchange stories, to bond in a warmth that defies the blizzard. In the closing stanza, when the poet-narrator extols the power of the mind to conjure delightful immersive memories, he extends an invitation to the reader to tap that power, to feel the energy of memory, thus inviting the reader to join him around a kind of symbolic hearth.
The Village Newspaper
The poem juxtaposes nature and humanity in the symbols of the storm and the fireplace. But there is a reality that Whittier, writing close to 40 years after the snowstorm, must acknowledge: Revery cannot last. The world and all it is will trump the fancy and, he fears, will slowly conquer nature itself.
Whittier’s poem, because it warmly recreates a rural idyll of a time and place all but lost to his own era, introduces the intrusion of that real-time world with the arrival, with more than a week’s delay due to the snowstorm, of the village newspaper. To this point in the poem, the printed word had been yet another sort of refuge, a sanctuary away from the pressing realities of the real-time world. After the storm, to pass the time, the family members had “read and reread [their] little store” (677) of books, collections of poems, and a “harmless” (677) novel or two. Indeed, the poet, although he recalls his childhood room had only a few books, invokes a variety of classical works from Antiquity as well as Biblical references, and references drawn from Greek and Roman mythologies. The village newspaper, when it at last appears on the farmhouse doorstep, brings with it the real-world, the world that cannot be eased by the imagination or infused with the rich energy of symbols, which defies the ornamentation of evocative language. It is an ordinary weekly village newspaper, with the usual stories of wars overseas, crimes at home, weather reports, wedding announcements, and obituaries. It is the world as it is, what the poet terms the “stir of hall and street” (709).
The storm itself cannot last. Nor can the revery of memories. The return to the busy-ness of the world is as inevitable as it is prosaic, like the slow steady traffic of carts and horses that have resumed their travels along the road by the farmhouse. “The world,” the poet says with no great enthusiasm, “was ours once more!” (714), the exclamation point underscoring the effort such enthusiasm requires.
