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.
Themes
The Power of Nature
From the opening stanzas, nature looms large in Whittier’s vision; its power is palpable, its reach dramatic and intrusive. Even as the brothers hustle to secure the barn just ahead of the gathering storm, the horizon turns an oppressive gray, the rapidly thickening sky offers a “mute and ominous prophecy” (6). The two-day storm is captured with vivid, naturalistic detailing—this is no metaphorical storm. This is a classic, brutal New England nor’easter. Whittier recreates the blizzard with exactness and specificity. The bitter wind shrieks, blasting off the ocean; the “moaning” (103) tree limbs sway blindly in the furious squalls; an Arctic cold grips the farm (“a chill no coat, however stout / Of homespun stuff could quite shut out” [9 -10]); the steady drifting snow transfigures the farmyard; the sun quickly becomes ironic and useless.
Nature is at once capable of great power and transfiguring beauty. Within nature’s vast realm, humanity, represented by the family and the boarders who gather about the hearth safe and secure, certainly, but marooned nonetheless, “shut in from all the world without” (155), struggles just to adjust, struggles to respond. Humanity is essentially, existentially helpless, vulnerable. Even as this storm passes, even as the teams of oxen plow through the leaden drifts to make clear the roads, even as the world appears to move back to normal in the closing stanzas, there lingers the unsettling reality that nature still waits to flex its power again. This vision of the power of nature and the visceral feel of its omnipotence is all but lost on Whittier’s contemporary audience. This audience is certain that, with the dawn of the industrial age and the rise of the city, nature has finally been domesticated. Whittier thus reminds his contemporary audience of the continuing power of raw nature.
The Passage of Time
“Snow-Bound” is a contrapuntal narrative, that is it relates two stories at once, set in different tenses. One is in the past tense, Whittier’s loving and sentimental recreation of the story of his family and their friends, stuck inside during a furious two-day blizzard, finding pleasure and joy gathered cozily around the farmhouse hearth. That bittersweet exercise in nostalgia, that pleasant it-seems-like-only-yesterday reverie, however, is periodically interrupted by the poet, decades later, looking back on how quickly and completely the world has changed.
The transitions between stanzas set in the past and those set in the present are jarring. The past flows into the present without boundaries or delineations, underscoring the sense of the absolute and irrevocable flow of time itself. The narrator understands that the bucolic and innocent world of the farm is gone, that the nation, so young and so vital in the past tense stanzas of the poem, struggles now to understand the implications of a traumatic civil war. The poet and his country have aged. “O Time and Change—with hair as gray / As was my sire’s that winter day / How strange it seems with so much gone” (179-81).
The poem uses the transitions between past and narrative present to suggest the swift and unstoppable passage of time, and with it the heavy burden of loss. The poet accepts such reality without melodramatic handwringing or eloquent despair. He is, after all, instilled with Yankee stoicism and can-do self-reliance. Indeed, the poet in the narrative present notes, not laments, that only he and his brother are still alive of those gathered around the hearth. Later in Stanza 15 and 16, he recalls the deaths of his two sisters and asks only that when his time has lapsed the cosmos will see fit to reunite them. Whittier thus uses the snowstorm to suggest a favorite theme of the Fireside Poets: the stark and irrefutable reality of mutability, how everything must change, how flux is the essence of the material universe and that within such energy humanity itself is helpless against the “restless sands’ incessant fall” (730). For Whittier, the choice is simple: grow old with dignity and with the gift of awareness.
The Consolation of Memory
The poem in effect has two endings. Without the closing two stanzas, 27 and 28, “Snow-Bound” would have ended with the poet’s stoic recollection of the inevitable return to the real-time world, the return to the “stir of hall and street / The pulse of life that round us beat” (710), the “world […] ours once more” (714). Whittier, however, moves in the last two stanzas to offer a greater consolation than a return to the cheerless clack and clamor of routine. Humanity has an unsuspected power that the poet wants to extol: the consolation of memory itself, the fetching “backward look” (715).
Reeling in the years for Whittier is not dismissed as the sad and pointless flight from the shabby reality of the present tense, a pitiful determination to escape reality by hiding within the sanctuary-shelter of memory. Rather, the poet compares the mind’s ability to summon the past with immediacy and vibrancy to the opportunity afforded by, say, the magnificent landscape canvases of the Dutch masters from the 16th century, so richly detailed and so carefully conceived, inviting willing museum visitors to pause and allow themselves to feel the aesthetic suction of the scene, to yield gratefully and completely, if temporarily, into the world of the painting. Stretch the hands of memory,” Whittier argues, and “warm them at the wood-fire’s blaze!” (750). Thus memory, far from some soft prison that insulates a person from a reality they cannot handle, is a gorgeously realized simulation, an inviting, immersive, interactive synthetic environment that, like the experience of a great painting, revives, stimulates, and reanimates, returning the poet to the present with a “grateful sense / Of sweetness near” (756-57).
