Boy at the Window

Seeing the snowman standing all alone

In dusk and cold is more than he can bear.

The small boy weeps to hear the wind prepare

A night of gnashings and enormous moan.

His tearful sight can hardly reach to where

The pale-faced figure with bitumen eyes

Returns him such a God-forsaken stare

As outcast Adam gave to paradise.

The man of snow is, nonetheless, content,

Having no wish to go inside and die.

Still, he is moved to see the youngster cry.

Though frozen water is his element,

He melts enough to drop from one soft eye

A trickle of the purest rain, a tear

For the child at the bright pane surrounded by

Such warmth, such light, such love, and so much fear.

Richard Wilbur

  Boy at the Window by Richard Wilbur and The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens are both examples of poems that use liberal amounts of nature imagery to enhance the picture that they paint.  Wilbur’s poem paints the picture of a snowman, outside on a dreadfully cold and stormy winter night.  The child at the window can hear the ‘gnashings’ and ‘moan’ of the wind, and looks out with pity upon the snowman’s ‘forsaken stare’.  In this first stanza, the image painted of the winter night is indeed a cruel one, which no human would want anything to suffer through.  The boy, who fears the cold and wind of the night, feels deep pity for the snowman, whom he imagines is suffering deeply from these very elements which he is afraid to face.  Similarly, Stevens paints in his poem the image of a harsh winter, with trees out in the freezing snow and ice, at mercy to the elements.  These nature images set the stage for the lessons of both poems, as they clearly portray the way that humans view cold and winter.

            It is at the end of the poems that we see why such nature images were used, as the human view of winter is then clearly contrasted with the view nature itself has for winter.  To the snowman in Wilbur’s poem, nature is his element.  Were he anywhere else, he would be dead.  The listener in Stevens’s poem, who seems to be a snowman as well, is also portrayed as having no cares about the harshness of the weather around him.  In fact, though he is surrounded by this winter of ice and snow, the snowman beholds nothing around him- he is not cold, nor in pain- he simply is.  This seems to be the main message of both poems, presented through imagery and comparison.  Nature is not affected by winter because it is winter.  The snowmen and trees are just as much a part of the winter as the wind and snow and ice.  For them, to be inside would be to die.  Humans, on the other hand, cannot accept that nature is content out in the winter just as humans themselves are content inside by the fireplace.  We must instead throw our feelings onto all that we see around us.  It is for this reason that the young boy throws his fear onto the face of the snowman, and it is for this reason that Stevens claims, “One must have a mind of winter,” or, “have been cold a long time” to simply accept nature as being, and no more.  Humans, who do not have minds of winter, cannot help but think the trees and snowmen are suffering out in the cold. 

            This image is carried even further in Wilbur’s poem, as the snowman looks at the boy in the window, so full of pity, and in return pities the boy.  Yet, the snowman does not pity the boy because he is inside, in a place with crackling fire and light, a place that would kill the snowman.  He instead pities the boy for his fear, because instead of simply accepting the fact that he is in his element and the snowman in his, he sits by the window and feels afraid for anything that is outdoors.  Nature, very rightly, sees what is and accepts it, without really seeing it at all, for really nature is a part of what is.  You cannot have the snowman without the storm.  The authors, especially Wilbur, seem to suggest that humans could take a page out of natures’ book in this regard, so that the boy, instead of being afraid for the snowman, could instead be content with his own natural space indoors, and the snowman’s own natural space out in the storm, neither fearing nor questioning, but simply being.

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