Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Snow-Flakes"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 3 December 2024

⏱️ 11 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

New-fallen snow can be a kind of blank canvas for the poet. In yesterday’s poem, Stevenson wrote over it in whimsical metaphor and simile; in today’s, Longfellow finds the reflection of his own troubled heart. Happy reading.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Tuesday, December 3rd, 2024. Our poem today is by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, one of our favorites here at the Daily Poem. It's called Snowflakes. And though the poem is dealing with the same metaphor as yesterday's poem, snow and its accumulation,
0:23.4	in the hands of Longfellow, it's a much weightier, a much heavier image, as you'll see.
0:31.2	Here is the poem. I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and read it one more time.
0:37.7	Snowflakes.
0:40.5	Out of the bosom of the air, out of the cloud folds of her garments shaken,
0:46.2	over the woodlands brown and bare, over the harvest fields forsaken,
0:50.6	silent and soft and slow, descends the snow.
0:59.2	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 troubled sky reveals
1:06.5	of the grief it feels. This is the poem of the air, slowly in the silent syllables recorded.
1:14.4	This is the secret of despair, long in its cloudy bosom hoarded, now whispered and revealed to wood
1:22.8	and field. There's a fairly neat progression in the three stanzas of this poem.
1:30.3	In the first, we have a careful description of snowfall.
1:34.3	It descends silent and soft and slow.
1:38.0	With that S and S rhythm, you can see or feel intimate the drifting down of flakes as the snow
1:49.8	begins to accumulate. And then in the second stanza, there's a noticing, a comparing. Even as
1:56.9	our cloudy fancies take suddenly shape in some divine expression, the falling of the snow or the work that the clouds do in dropping the snow is compared to the human imagination, the creative imagination.
2:14.6	The clouds are now laid side by side with the cloudy fancies of mankind, which suddenly
2:23.7	takes shape.
2:24.9	They may be gestating or germinating over a long period of time in the same way that the water
2:30.0	cycle might take days and weeks and months to run its course and those clouds grow lazily,
2:38.2	but then all at once the breaking point is reached and the load is deposited on the earth.
2:47.1	And while the sky might have other genres in which it works, snow is here said to be a sad
	...

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