Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl

For the contemporary ear, the strict rhyming form and carefully measured meter of Snow-Bound can be off-putting, even intimidating, given the poem’s epical length. The wall-of-sound effect, close to 800 lines of tightly measured beat and strict end rhymes, comes from Whittier’s passionate embrace of British metrics and his belief, like all of the Boston-based Fireside Poets, that American poetry, to be regarded as literary in merit, should scrupulously follow the inherited patterns of poetry.

The lines are iambic pentameter, a traditional device in long narrative poetry that dates back to Elizabethan England. There are five beats to each line with a pattern of a short stress followed by a long stress. For instance, Line 47, which recalls the first glimpse of the farm the first morning of the storm: “We looked upon a world unknown.” Read aloud, that pattern, at once stately and cadenced, followed so carefully for hundreds of lines, becomes hypnotic, the beat at times overwhelming the words themselves. In addition, the poem creates meter through the use of rhyming couplets, a device that traditionally aided in the memorization and public recitation of long poems. Across 759 lines, these rhymes, sometimes subtle, sometimes obvious, always clever and even sneaky, reveal Whittier’s deft command of language itself.