Today’s Poem: Snow-Bound

A universe of sky and snow

Currier and Ives, Winter Morning, 1861 (Springfield Museums)

Snow-Bound [an extract]

by John Greenleaf Whittier

The sun that brief December day 
Rose cheerless over hills of gray, 
And, darkly circled, gave at noon 
A sadder light than waning moon. 
Slow tracing down the thickening sky 
Its mute and ominous prophecy, 
A portent seeming less than threat, 
It sank from sight before it set. 
A chill no coat, however stout, 
Of homespun stuff could quite shut out, 
A hard, dull bitterness of cold, 
That checked, mid-vein, the circling race 
Of life-blood in the sharpened face, 
The coming of the snow-storm told. 
The wind blew east; we heard the roar 
Of Ocean on his wintry shore, 
And felt the strong pulse throbbing there 
Beat with low rhythm our inland air. . . .

Unwarmed by any sunset light 
The gray day darkened into night, 
A night made hoary with the swarm 
And whirl-dance of the blinding storm, 
As zigzag, wavering to and fro, 
Crossed and recrossed the wingëd snow: 
And ere the early bedtime came 
The white drift piled the window-frame, 
And through the glass the clothes-line posts 
Looked in like tall and sheeted ghosts. 

So all night long the storm roared on: 
The morning broke without a sun; 
In tiny spherule traced with lines 
Of Nature’s geometric signs, 
In starry flake, and pellicle,                      ◦ pellicle = cuticle, membrane
All day the hoary meteor fell; 
And, when the second morning shone, 
We looked upon a world unknown, 
On nothing we could call our own. 
Around the glistening wonder bent 
The blue walls of the firmament, 
No cloud above, no earth below, — 
A universe of sky and snow! 
The old familiar sights of ours 
Took marvellous shapes; strange domes and towers 
Rose up where sty or corn-crib stood, 
Or garden-wall, or belt of wood; 
A smooth white mound the brush-pile showed, 
A fenceless drift what once was road; 
The bridle-post an old man sat 
With loose-flung coat and high cocked hat; 
The well-curb had a Chinese roof; 
And even the long sweep, high aloof, 
In its slant splendor, seemed to tell 
Of Pisa’s leaning miracle. . . .
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In 1866, John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892) published Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl with few expectations. The poem was an awkward length, with 747 lines, and the publisher ballooned the text into a book by commissioning extensive illustrations. The result cost $1.25 retail — an expensive publication for the time.

But the book caught its moment. For a country worn out by the agitations of the Civil War, Snow-Bound seemed an escape to an idealized past, a nostalgic look back at American semi-rural life of previous generations, drawn from Whittier’s memories of his childhood home in Haverhill, Massachusetts. And so the book sold well — and more than sold. The poem became a centerpiece of American literature: required knowledge for anyone who wanted to embrace the nation’s art.

All the Fireside Poets have faded since the days they seemed the pinnacle of new literature, the triple-named dwellers on New England’s 19th-century Parnassus, towering above the literary plain. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., James Russell Lowell, William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: None of them have reputations close to what they once possessed. But John Greenleaf Whittier seems among the most faded of those poets, in part because his most identifiable work has fallen from memory. Who now reads Snow-Bound? What teacher still assigns it? What anthology still includes it?

Oh, a few here and there, no doubt, but the poem is no longer taken as central to American experience or necessary to read to understand the national culture. And that’s a shame, for Whittier was doing interesting things in the poem.

Notice, for example, the opening. Rhymed tetrameter couplets are a dangerous choice for narrative poetry. They threaten to become sing-songy and repetative, those four beats in each iambic line (especially when read at the speed with which we typically recite narrative verse) turning into a mockably monotone rhythm, with little space in which to perform substitutions. And Whittier show us that straightforward iambic tetrameter in the first lines:

The sun that brief December day
Rose cheerless over hills of gray,
And, darkly circled, gave at noon
A sadder light than waning moon.

But just as we’re about to fall into the bouncy patterns of children’s verse, Whittier shows us the techniques that slow verse down. Look at the next four lines:

Slow tracing down the thickening sky
Its mute and ominous prophecy,
A portent seeming less than threat,
It sank from sight before it set.

Here the craftsman deploys long vowels (slow in an unstressed position, for example), three-beat substitutions (thickening, ominous), and the extended alliteration of “It sank from sight before it set.” These techniques continue through the poem as it sketches its memories of the poet’s childhood in a winter farmhouse, with sharply visual descriptions of New England’s December landscape.

But the social argument of the poem is worth noticing, as well — not just the nostalgia that was a kind of wound-binding for the injured nation. Snow-Bound also makes an interesting claim about the dangers of nature and the dangers of our fellow man. The deadliness of the snow outside is matched by an implied peril indoors. And what keeps us from one another’s throats are — Whittier suggests — the acts of reading aloud and telling stories. The sociality of narrative art overcomes cabin fever (as instanced in the poem itself). We do not go mad in the darkness of winter, murderous in the forced irritation of cramped spaces, because we step outside ourselves as we listen to books read aloud and stories told of the youth of the older generations.

That is, in its way, as high a claim for the power of art as any poem has ever made.

John Greenleaf Whittier, 1833 (Wikimedia Commons)

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