The poem for a winter storm: Snow-Bound by John Greenleaf Whittier

As The Two Palaverers, Recollecting Nemasket, and IM Blogn remind us, few things resemble life in times past than being trapped indoors during a winter snowstorm. John Greenleaf Whittier wrote the classic account of the experience in his 759-line winter idyll Snow-Bound, published as a book in February 1866 and an instant bestseller. James Russell Lowell immediately appreciated its evocative nostalgia: “It describes scenes and manners which the rapid changes of our national habits will soon have made as remote from us as if they were foreign or ancient.”

In the poem a middle-aged narrator recaptures what he endured as a ten-year-old boy trapped by a two-day blizzard with his family and friends in a country farmhouse.

What matter how the night behaved?
What matter how the north-wind raved?
Blow high, blow low, not all its snow
Could quench our hearth-fire’s ruddy glow.

How did they pass the time? As Whittier explains in his headnote to the 1888 edition of the poem:

In my boyhood, in our lonely farm-house, we had scanty sources of information, few books and only a small weekly newspaper. Our only annual was the Almanac. Under such circumstances story-telling was a necessary resource in the long winter evenings. My father when a young man had traversed the wilderness to Canada, and could tell us of his adventures with Indians and wild beasts, and of his soujourn in the French villages. My uncle was ready with his record of hunting and fishing and, it must be confessed, with stories which he at least half believed, of witchcraft and apparitions. My mother, who was born in the Indian-haunted region of Somersworth, New Hampshire . . . told us of the inroads of the savages. . . 

Most curious and comical of the poem’s “inmates” is the “not unfeared, half-welcome guest.” Whittier identifies this neighboring boarder in his headnote as:

Harriet Livermore, daughter of Judge Livermore, of New Hampshire, a young woman of fine natural ability, enthusiastic, eccentric, with slight control over her violent temper . . . She was equally ready to exhort in school-house prayer-meetings and dance in a Washington ball-room, while her father was a member of Congress. . . A friend of mine found her, when quite an old woman, wandering in Syria with a tribe of Arabs, who with the Oriental notion that madness is inspiration, accepted her as their prophetess and leader.

Whittier’s royalties were ten cents a copy and he ultimately collected more than $10,000 from sales of the bound volume of the poem.

Other classic winter poems:

“The Snow Man” by Wallace Stevens
“The Snow Storm” by Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost

Also of interest:

• Listen to a free recording or download eBook versions of Snow-Bound at LibriVox
• The best recording of Snow-Bound is probably by Michael Maglaras, performed as part of the 2007 Whittier Bicentennial Recording Project. Read his recent appreciation of Snow-Bound on his blog.
• Visit the John Greenleaf Whittier Homestead (site of Snow-Bound) in Haverhill, Massachusetts

Related LOA works: James Greenleaf Whittier: Selected Poems; American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, volume one: Freneau to Whitman (includes the complete text of Snow-Bound and eighteen other poems by Whittier)

John Greenleaf Whittier, Muriel Rukeyser on poetry’s role in protest

Adam O’Riordan’s Guardian blog post this week, “What’s poetry’s role in protest politics?,” prompted a cascade of comments. He asks:

At times of upheaval and unrest, is poetry’s role to fan the flames or cool tempers? Down the centuries it has proved remarkably effective at both.

O’Riordan cites well-known examples of activist poetry, like Percy Bysshe Shelley “The Masque of Anarchy” and Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” and contrasts those with tonic calls for calm like Richard Wilbur’s “To the Student Strikers.” Or, O’Riordan wonders, is poetry perhaps better suited to document “the aftermath of great events” as Sean O’Brien did in Cousin Coat or Ken Smith in Wormwood and Wild Root.

American poetry has its own extensive tradition of poetic activism and historical reclamation. Just this week we celebrated the birthdays of two exemplars.

Readers anesthetized by having to memorize “Snow-Bound” did not get to experience all that John Greenleaf Whittier was. As Brenda Wineapple writes in her introduction to John Greenleaf Whittier: Selected Poems, “Whittier often wrote better, more courageously, and with more beauty than we knew.”

A self-taught versifier, working farmer, devout Quaker, and activist editor, Whittier (whose birthday is today) believed slavery the scourge of the country and joined the northern anti-slavery movement in his early twenties. His reward was often to be pelted with stones, mud, sticks and rotten eggs by mobs in New England as he campaigned with anti-slavery activists. More than almost any other nineteenth-century poet, Whittier strove to combine politics with poetry. As Wineapple notes, his poems “were meant to be read, sung, shouted, or printed on broadsides.”

Wineapple admits that Whittier’s earliest efforts could be “diffuse” and open to misinterpretation. The historian Perry Miller characterized “Toussaint l’Ouverture” (1833), an account of the 1794 slave uprising in Haiti, as “probably one of the least useful contributions to the abolitionist cause” because its brutal depiction of the rape of a French planter’s wife could be construed as an argument against, not for, emancipation. Other Whittier poems, however, stirred the soul. “Song of Slaves in the Desert” dramatizes the plight of a dispossessed people who cry the refrain, “Where are we going, Rubee?”

A century later Muriel Rukeyser was no less an activist. She was just twenty when she traveled to Scottsboro, Alabama, to report on the nine African American youths convicted of raping two white women (a decision later overturned by the Supreme Court). She was jailed there for fraternizing with other journalists across racial lines and ended up contracting typhoid fever. Her trip in 1936 to Gauley Bridge in West Virginia, the site of the (then) worst industrial disaster in American history, charged “The Book of the Dead” (1938) with an urgent mix of investigative journalism, lyricism, and a call to arms:

What three things can never be done?
Forget.     Keep Silent.      Stand alone.
The hills of glass, the fatal brilliant plain.

Two lines from Rukeyser’s poem “Käthe Kollwitz” gave Louise Bernikow the title for her pathbreaking 1974 anthology The World Split Open: Four Centuries of Women Poets in England and America:

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
    The world would split open

Also of interest:

• Listen to Marilyn Waniek deliver a poignant reading of Whittier’s “Song of Slaves in the Desert” in Segment Three of The Republic of Verse podcast
• View Muriel Rukeyser’s FBI file
• Read more about Muriel Rukeyser’s prose and poetry at the Modern American Poetry website

Related LOA works: John Greenleaf Whittier: Selected Poems; Muriel Rukeyser: Selected Poems