When the Snow Falls
The Dance
When the Snow Falls - meaning Summary
Intimate Fleeting Mutual Dance
Williams compares falling snow to human relationships: flakes spin "two and two" in an intimate, choreographed pairing that mirrors lovers who hold, part, and take new partners. The poem treats companionship as transient yet necessary, arguing that the only certainty is the dance itself. Natural images — twigs, storm, woods — underscore how external forces intervene, playing with and discarding participants while urging readers to embrace the dance as their own.
Read Complete AnalysesWhen the snow falls the flakes spin upon the long axis that concerns them most intimately two and two to make a dance the mind dances with itself, taking you by the hand, your lover follows there are always two, yourself and the other, the point of your shoe setting the pace, if your break away and run the dance is over Breathlessly you will take another partner better or worse who will keep at your side, at your stops whirls and glides until he too leaves off on his way down as if there were another direction gayer, more carefree spinning face to face but always down with each other secure only in each other’s arms But only the dance is sure! make it your own. Who can tell what is to come of it? in the woods of your own nature whatever twig interposes, and bare twigs have an actuality of their own this flurry of the storm that holds us, plays with us and discards us dancing, dancing as may be credible.
This is the 1916 magazine version of William Carlos Williams’s “Love Song,” first published in Poetry (November 1916). Williams soon revised it for Al Que Quiere! (1917), dropping this three-line opening address and tightening the close.
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