Boy at the Window

There is a disarming charm to Wilbur’s poem, an unassuming gentleness, even sweetness that would be typical of, say, a fairy tale or a children’s book, more fittingly perhaps, given Wilbur’s extensive catalogue of such books.

Because the snowman, an inanimate object, is gifted with the wisdom of the poem, the poem happily defies the logic of realism and ushers the willing reader into a world of innocence and magic. Drawing on the endearing figure of Frosty the Snowman, the poem creates a fantasy world that, nevertheless, like all children’s stories, illuminates a very adult world. In this case, the poem tests the difficult and very grown-up dynamic of bittersweet empathy, that complex feeling of stepping entirely out of yourself and caring deeply and personally about the dilemmas that others face even when, or particularly if, you are helpless to actually alleviate that suffering.

The boy (he is given no name or personal background, in keeping with the children’s book ambience) sits at the window of his comfortable home and frets over the bleak fate facing the snowman he built. Because he is the snowman’s creator, he feels an inexplicable urgency to his fretting—in a way he cannot entirely grasp, he feels responsible for the snowman being in his yard; he coaxed him into being from what were otherwise heaps of formless snow. In his innocence, he imagines that somehow the snowman is capable of animation and can relocate into the warmth and comfort of the home. For the boy, night is approaching, a groaning “enormous” (Line 4) monster of a villain all too appropriate to the logic of a children’s book. Drawing on what is presumably his Judeo-Christian upbringing and most likely hours of dutiful church attendance and Sunday school classes, the boy sees himself as the God figure from the opening chapters of Genesis. Like the Genesis God working His magic from cosmic dust, the boy has created life from inanimate material. It is the boy’s perception of a caring God that surely if God is in His heaven, safe and comfortable, he must look down on his pitiful creations here on Earth and feel a powerful empathy for their suffering.

In keeping with his childlike perception of himself as God the creator, the boy, as he stares out at the what seems to be the forlorn snowman, imagines that the snowman itself is now like Adam kicked out of the Garden of Eden and looking back at the Paradise that is no longer his—in this case, the comfortable and cheery home in which the boy sits, apart from and yet a part of the snowman’s plight. For the boy, the snowman is appropriately a “god-forsaken” (Line 7) “outcast (Line 8), left to rely on his own thin resources to survive the brutal night. 

The second stanza shifts to the perspective of the snowman. In gifting the snowman with thoughts, emotions, and indeed, with wisdom, the poem relies on personification typical of children’s stories. We accept without question that the snowman thinks, reacts, reasons, and even weeps. The snowman begins with the obvious corrective that would in fact allay the boy’s fears entirely: bring me into that warm and inviting paradise and you would destroy me. The snowman has no problem being out in the cold night—as snow, that forbidding nightscape is his welcoming environment. He is of the winter, “frozen water is his element” (Line 12). He has “no wish to go inside and die” (Line 10).

The snowman’s dilemma, however, is that although he understands he is safe and is exactly where he needs to be, he cannot share that reassurance with the boy at the window. The snowman therefore must watch helplessly as the boy with such a tender heart is wracked by a guilt he need not feel and a sense of responsibility he need not regret. How can the snowman reassure the boy at the window? The snowman reveals his empathy for the boy when, moved by the boy’s show of compassion and gentle caring, the snowman “melts enough” (Line 12) to allow a tear to fall from his “soft eye” (Line 13). In the first stanza, the boy describes the snowman’s eyes as “bitumen,” suggesting they are forbiddingly inanimate, untouched by feeling or emotion. Here it is that coal eye itself that reveals the snowman’s deep emotions. That display, of course, is unavailable to the boy—a trickle of a tear dropping down against the white of the snowman’s face, all obscured by the descending dark of night. The boy does not know the snowman’s selfless and kind heart, suggested by the phrase “trickle of the purest rain” (Line 14). But the realization leaves the snowman feeling helpless, anchored as he is to the yard. He understands only that the boy at the window must live surrounded by warmth and light, yes, even love—but also by fear.

The poem then closes with a sense of empathy that is both profound and vulnerable. The boy, in his innocence, empathizes but for all the wrong reasons; the snowman cares but cannot express that compassion.