Poetry
Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl
John Greenleaf Whittier · 1866
Opening lines
The sun that brief December day
Rose cheerless over hills of gray,
And, darkly circled, gave at noon
A sadder light than waning moon.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
On a grey December day, the wind blows from the east and the snow comes with the night. It falls for a whole night and a whole day, buries the farm, and wipes out the garden wall and the road; on the father's orders, the boys dig a tunnel to the barn. In the evening, the family gathers around the fire: the father, the mother, the uncle and the aunt tell in turn of hunting, fishing and the Indians of long ago, and the poet draws the portrait of his two sisters, the schoolmaster and a dreaded guest, as long as the wood lasts.
Context
The work was published in Boston by Ticknor and Fields on 17 February 1866, in fifty-two pages. It recounts a storm from its author's childhood, in the family farmhouse at Haverhill built in 1688, and evokes one by one, without naming them, the members of the circle seated before the hearth; most of them were dead when he wrote it, and the youngest sister the year before. The guest was Harriet Livermore, a judge's daughter, as the author revealed in a note of 1888. Twenty thousand copies were sold before summer, and the success put the author beyond want for the rest of his life.
Who it is for
A narrative poem of 759 short lines, with no French translation on record. The customs and objects of a farm of the early nineteenth century are named in it without being explained.
Prizes and reception
Its author earned some ten thousand dollars from it, and its sales were surpassed, in American favour, only by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha.
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