Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl

In the first four stanzas of the poem, Whittier introduces the critical theme of the power of nature. The mood here is edged with quiet crisis. Much like the English Romantics, whom Whittier admired, the poem begins with an assertion of the centrality of nature. This is, however, not Mother Nature. This is no nurturing force. There is power in the natural world as the winter storm approaches. The sun is “cheerless” (2) and its light feeble. The sun sinks from sight in the face of the storm gathering on the horizon. The hills fade to gray as the world darkens into night. The feeling here is foreboding, the unnerving anticipation of something unusual, something cataclysmic. The members of the family go about their routine chores, pretending that nature was not about to demonstrate its might. The children dutifully fetch cordwood, sweep the hay from the barn floors, and feed the horses and cows their grains. The narrator suggests a quiet and uncertain urgency about the chores, a common-sense response to the imminence of the powerful storm. The poem lovingly details these everyday farm chores. But they are prelude to the unleashing of the nor’easter. When the storm begins and maintains its fierce presence for two days, the blizzard transforms the entire world: “We looked upon a world unknown / On nothing we could call our own” (48-49).

Stanzas 5-9 juxtapose the power of nature against the resilience of people as the family responds to the disastrous storm. The first morning, the father pragmatically dispatches the narrator and his brother to dig a tunnel to the barn to feed the animals. The boys turn the chore into a wildly inventive game, imagining they are tunneling into the fabulous caves of Aladdin from The Tales of the Arabian Nights. There is no despair, no depression. The mood for this section is set by the insulated quilted world left behind by the storm. All is calm. This is resilient New England / Yankee can-do stoicism. The narrator recalls he hears nothing, the usual buzz and hum from the town is silenced: “No welcome sound of toil or mirth / Unbound the spell” (107-08). As the sun sets and the night returns, the tone threatens but never surrenders to existential isolation, the fear of people diminished into irrelevancy by a vast and angry storm that threatens them with possible starvation or hypothermia. The poem resists such melodramatic surrender. The boys gather armfuls of chopped wood and head into the farmhouse where they bank a splendid roaring fire around which the family and the two boarders gather and enjoy mugs of hot cider and sweet baked apples. “We sat the clean-winged hearth about / Content to let the north-wind roar” (156-57).

Stanza 10 abruptly alters the mood. Here the narrator breaks the narrative timeline. He sadly acknowledges “Time and Change” (179) and reveals that all but his brother have died in the decades since the storm: “The voices of that hearth are still” (188). The story is suddenly repurposed as a memory. This tonal shift informs the unfolding stories with a subtle sadness, a feeling of time lost. The world he recreates, he admits, “cast no shade” (197). The narrator introduces in a sidebar the hard reality of the brutal civil war the country has just survived, and how the country fought to free itself from “the red scourge of bondage” (222). The war serves as a reminder of the division, agonies, and sorrows of the contemporary world before the narrator returns to the hearth and his thoughts about the past.

The stories shared around the hearth by the different members of the narrator’s family and then by the family’s two boarders each reflect different aspects of a time past, a world lost. The mother relates hair-raising stories about frontier life and the first-generation Quaker settlers and their showdowns with Native Americans over settling the land of plenty. The father then effuses warmly about his long afternoons hunting and fishing in the glorious abundance of the wilderness along the Merrimack River, a celebration of nature’s fecundity echoed by the uncle who disdains book learning and the prison of the schoolhouse. “Himself to Nature’s heart so near” (317), he celebrates the munificence of the countryside undisturbed by people and teeming with curious and fascinating creatures. The aunt speaks up next, a generous and compassionate woman who never married but who has lived an exemplary life of dedicated service to her community. With each tale told, “forgotten was the outside cold” (338).

When the narrator mentions his sisters who were there by the fire, however, the frame again intrudes. The poet at midlife reminds the reader that the gathering about the roaring fire against the howling winter is a memory. He admits his two sisters have both died, one shortly after the winter of the great storm, the other just a few months past. Departing entirely from the narrative of the snow storm, the poet says he now seeks the consolation of nature when he feels most deeply the absence of his much-loved sisters, “safe in [their] immortality” (424). Nature, then, provides the narrator even in a narrative present that is so estranged from nature with the same spiritual communion celebrated decades earlier by his family in the wilderness. If time is the problem, nature is the answer. In the end, the narrator consoles himself that he will be reunited with his sisters, will see them “white against the evening star” (436) when he transcends into heaven.

The poem returns to the fireside. The sketches of the schoolteacher and then the itinerant preacher expand the circle of comfort and community beyond the family. Both are boarders and both are welcomed. The teacher reveals a sweet and goofy humanity (he skates with intensity, plays the violin with cheerful abandon, plays hide and seek with the cat) despite his passionate advocacy of abolition and his determination, in the classroom, to forge a better generation of young men who will finally end the scourge of slavery. The itinerant preacher, based on the historic figure of Harriet Livermore (1788-1868), travels the backroads of Massachusetts bringing a message of uncompromising moral intensity, daring the settlers to abandon “[t]he outward, wayward life” (565) and hold true to their Christian values or face grim apocalyptic judgment. She terrifies those gathered about the hearth with the “honeyed music of her tongue” (513). Her manner is “passionate and bold” (515); she is a “not unfeared, half-welcome guest” (520). “A woman tropical, intense / in thought and act” (531-32), she brings to the narrative a sense of unbending old-school morality all but lost in the contemporary culture of the narrator’s present, an immoral world embracing the greed of capitalism and the dehumanization of industrialization, a world that abandoned slavery only after years of brutal war.

It is that world that returns in Stanzas 24-28. After each of those gathered by the hearth is gifted with the sweet slumber of security despite the lingering blasts of the storm outside, the real-time world inevitably returns. First the teamsters with their brace of oxen plow out the roads, then the business of the nearby town resumes (symbolized by the sounds of sleigh bells and then by the appearance of the indefatigable doctor taking up his house call rounds), and finally the long-delayed town newspaper arrives with its usual tally of wars, moral corruption, crimes, greed, and natural disasters. “All the world,” the narrator intones with bittersweet regret, “was ours once more” (714).

The two closing stanzas (27 and 28) offer a moral frame to the narrative, a summary philosophical insight to clarify the reason for sharing the story of the family and friends marooned in a nasty New England blizzard. The sobering insight here is the power of memory to recreate with vivid exactness the “spectral past” (720). The world of the farmhouse, the poet understands, is a dream, a reverie saved for “some lull of life” (740). That world, the aging narrator says, is like the lost pastoral worlds captured by the great Flemish landscape painters that the narrator studies in museums. The snow-bound world of his childhood is a world as near as it is distant, a world as recovered as it is lost, as permanent as it is fleeting. The poet embraces the outstretched “hands of memory” (749), its benediction allowing him to conjure his remembrance of things not just past but lost.