Snow-Flakes

Literary Commentary

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Snow-Flakes is a three-stanza atmospheric lyric in which a snowfall becomes a confession the sky has been holding for a long time. Three sextets, each closing with a contracted couplet, move from pure description to explicit analogy to outright identification: the snow is no longer like grief, it is grief, articulated at last in silent syllables across the bare countryside.

The poem works as a small machine for converting weather into psychology. Stanza one offers nothing but the natural fact — air, cloud-folds, woodlands brown and bare, harvest-fields forsaken — and ends with the descent itself, the meter contracting to two short lines as the snow settles. Stanza two then hinges the analogy with twin clauses: "Even as our cloudy fancies take / Suddenly shape in some divine expression, / Even as the troubled heart doth make / In the white countenance confession." The grammar names what the imagery is doing.

The closing tercet completes the move. "This is the poem of the air, / Slowly in silent syllables recorded; / This is the secret of despair, / Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded." The snow does not stand for despair; the sky has been hoarding despair, and the snow is its release. The audience for this confession is not a listener but a landscape — "whispered and revealed / To wood and field." The reader stands outside, having overheard.

Key themes

• Hidden grief made articulate by nature
• Pathetic fallacy raised to structural method
• Snowfall as written and spoken text
• The slow relief of long-held sorrow finally released

Notable craft elements

• Three matched six-line stanzas rhyming ABABCC, each stanza taking fresh end-sounds
• Each stanza shortens at lines five and six — the longer four-beat lines settle into a brief two-line cadence so the snow descends inside the meter
• Anaphora built into the structure — twin Even as clauses in stanza two, twin This is clauses in stanza three — staging the turn from analogy to identity
• Sustained sibilance and soft consonants, from Silent, and soft, and slow through silent syllables — the hush is engineered

Reread prompt

On a second reading, watch how the poem moves from describing a snowfall, to comparing it to a troubled heart, to declaring it the heart's confession outright. At what line does the analogy stop being analogy and start being identification?

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