17 pages • 34 minutes read
Richard WilburBoy at the Window
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1952A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Form
“Boy at the Window” reflects Wilbur’s belief in the cooperation between a poem’s form and its themes. The poem’s form suggests the theme of separation. Wilbur divides the poem into two equal octets, or eight-line stanzas. Both stanzas are three sentences. Both stanzas share the same tight rhyme scheme: ABBA BCBC. They are mirror stanzas, which suggests the emotional sympatico between the boy and his snowman.
But they do not share perspective. The two stanzas, each one controlled by one of the two characters, enhances the poem’s sense of separation. That formal device creates a feeling of an unbridgeable gap, one in the warm house, the other outside. The thin yet absolute ribbon of white between the two stanzas suggests the window that keeps apart the boy and the snowman.
And although the two stanzas are kept apart, Wilbur slyly introduces quiet (subliminal) cooperation between the two that registers quietly in careful recitation, specifically the use of the near-rhymes from Stanza 1 (“eyes” and “Paradise”) with near-rhymes from Stanza 2 (“cry” and “eye”). Thus, in form the boy and the snowman are physically distant from each other and yet spiritually close.
Meter
Wilbur executes the poem in iambic pentameter, a traditional meter that dates to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Each line is strictly measured without insisting on singsong-y regularity.
The meter never draws attention to itself because the beat—each line has ten syllables divided into five two-beat units that each move from unstressed to stressed—mimics the unaffected plainsong of conversation. The meter is casual; the poem scans only discretely a poem. The meter—da-DUH da-DUH—comes off easy, subtle. And because the meter so often relies on enjambment, a technique in which a line does not end with finality, a period, for instance, or a comma, but rather moves into the next line. Recitation thus avoids the militant strident beat and creates a softer, quieter meter that helps endow the tableau Wilbur conjures with its soft, subtle beat. The poem reflects Wilbur’s fascination with the music latent in conversational communication. Read aloud, the poem manipulates soft consonants (particularly s’s) and gentle vowels (particularly long e’s) to enhance the metrical effect. Metrically, Wilbur’s is the poetry of “yet.” Wilbur’s lines are at once accessible and yet crafted, careless and yet careful, conversational and yet poetic.
Voice
Because “Boy at the Window” became one of Wilbur’s most popular poems, Wilbur delighted in sharing the story of the poem’s inception: his concerns over his five-year old son who fretted over the fate of a snowman the two of them had built that afternoon after a typical Connecticut snowstorm. But the voice that relates the poem is not the gentle voice of a loving parent bemused by his child’s needless anxieties.
Rather the voice in each stanza matches the controlling perspective. In Stanza 1, the voice reflects the boy’s terrors—the images are violent, the vocabulary noisy and distressed (cold, gnashings, moan, god-forsaken, outcast), the sound is chopped by hard consonants and long vowels. Stanza 2 is less emphatic, less violent, reflecting the calm, grown-up wisdom of the snowman. For instance, in the first stanza the snowman has “bitumen eyes”—the phrase harsh and choppy—in the second stanza the same snowman has a “soft eye” –the phrase gentler and quieter. If the snowman could calm the boy, then the voice that sounds in the second stanza comes across as soothing like the voice of a caring father calming his son.
