Snow-Flakes
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow * Track #4 On Birds of Passage. Flight the Second
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Album Birds of Passage. Flight the Second
Snow-Flakes by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Henry Wadsworth LongfellowAbout
This poem was written 18 years after the death of the poet’s wife, Frances “Fanny” Longfellow. It expresses his despair and memorializes her through nature imagery. However, the imagery also refers to the gruesome manner of her death, as she was fatally burned when a candle or piece of hot wax ignit...
Snow-Flakes Annotated
Out of the bosom of the Air,
Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
Silent, and soft, and slow
Descends the snow.
Even as our cloudy fancies take
Suddenly shape in some divine expression,
Even as the troubled heart doth make
In the white countenance confession,
The troubled sky reveals
The grief it feels.
This is the poem of the air,
Slowly in silent syllables recorded;
This is the secret of despair,
Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded,
Now whispered and revealed
To wood and field.