Snow
Snow - meaning Summary
Anticipation Made Physical
The poem captures the sudden, contagious excitement of impending snow as felt by animals and children. Frost contrasts ordinary indoor routines—"pinewood desks" and "blackboard"—with an urgent, animal alertness that comes from outdoors. Sensory language shifts perception: scent, light, and cold move inward, making students brim with a bright, distant scene where snowflakes transform familiar streets and roofs. The poem is about a shared, almost physical anticipatory joy that dissolves the boundary between human order and the wild, bringing distant sky and falling light into immediate, palpable experience.
Read Complete AnalysesA stirring as among cattle that lift their heads through darkness to the scent of water, horses snuffing at thunder in the grass. And nothing today will keep them quiet or still in the pinewood desks or summon their eyes to reflect figures and cold facts from the blackboard. They brim with light, a window-square where trees writhe, sky glows greenish bronze and staggers white like surf. Their senses catch it from far off, something moves toward them, edging closer even then lead pencils, cats, chalk or the salty creases in clothes, an excitement whose crystals fall through their veins, the spaces of their skull, wavering towards them (animal eyes, the nostrils flared) like the feathers of owls, angel sky-flakes blessing the dull cobbles and slant black roofs, bare playground, pond. On their hands the taste of stars, a foreign coldness, colour of distances and all that is further off than flesh. Falling light strikes upward. Its brightness creaks under our shoes.
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