Boy at the Window

Reflecting his career-long fascination with the revelations of everyday moments, Richard Wilbur’s “Boy at the Window,” is a poignant narrative of a young boy fretting over the perils his backyard snowman will face as the bitter winter night approaches. It lovingly illuminates the anxieties of childhood and the difficult trick of empathy. First published in the January 5, 1952 New Yorker to a world eye-deep in winter, the poem juxtaposes the sweet if hyperbolic fears of the boy against the wiser and more balanced wisdom of the snowman who understands that being out in the winter night is exactly where he needs to be.

By the time of the poem’s publication, Wilbur was widely seen as the heir-apparent to Robert Frost, then in his late seventies. With Wilbur’s reader-friendly, often folksy poetic line, his willingness to examine the everyday world and share stunning and often heartwarming insights, and his mastery of traditional formal structures of rhythm and rhyme in an age obsessed with open verse, Wilbur emerged in a career that spanned more than six decades as one of America’s most recognized and most read poets. The tender “Boy at the Window” is still among Wilbur’s most anthologized—and beloved—poems.