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.
Symbols & Motifs
The Window
The boy and the snowman sit on opposite sides of a window. The boy, for all his worrying over the snowman is still separated from him. And the snowman for all his concern for the boy’s anxieties by the boy’s tender heart is still separated from the boy. The window thus symbolizes the paradoxical separation and intimacy of distance, reflecting the complex dynamic of empathy itself.
Given the poem’s perspective switch in the stanzas, the reader is also positioned at first behind the window and then outside looking in. The window thus allows the reader the opportunity to engage empathetically with both characters as they press against the window with the young boy as he frets over the fate of his snowman; then the reader is with the snowman on the other side of the window hoping somehow to calm the anxieties of the boy.
The Snowman’s Tears
Although both characters cry, the poem imbues the snowman’s tears with elevated implications. Even as the small boy weeps (Line 3), those tears are an expression of helplessness. The snowman’s tears, on the other hand, symbolize empathy itself, how a heart moved to care about others dismisses as irrelevant concerns about itself. The snowman cries despite not because of himself.
It is at once the most impactful and the most absurd symbol in the poem. The snowman, moved to see the youngster at the window tearing, cries, a “trickle of the purest rain” (14). The boys tears are understandable: he panics over the fate of his creation. But he stays safe and warm. To cry, for the snowman, is to risk his very destruction; the snowman survives only keeping his frozen water, well, frozen. As he points out, going into the home would render him little more than a puddle. That the snowman, overwhelmed by emotion, wills himself to risk his own destruction to express those feelings, that sense of empathy, makes those tears the “purest rain” as they reflect selfless caring.
Adam
It is an odd comparison for any boy, to imagine that the snowman left out in the bitter cold is like Adam cast out of Eden. It seems blasphemous because the theological idea the boy draws upon, he applies to a snowman. Much like his fears over the snowman left out in the cold, the boy’s use of Adam reflects more his youth than his insight. As the snowman points out, if you are made of snow than a warm and cozy room is hardly Paradise.
But the boy’s quick use of Adam and the Genesis story of humanity’s fall is telling. The boy already knows the story of humanity’s failure and how the transgression of Adam doomed everyone to a life of suffering forever mulling over the implications of their fallen nature and how completely they disappointed the generous and loving Creator God. The boy’s tender young life is already informed by the Christian parable of moral failure and the struggle to please a bookkeeper God, a long life of uneasiness, stress, and paranoia. That the boy applies the idea of Adam and humanity’s fall from grace to a snowman in his backyard is humorous; that the boy already understands the fallen nature of humanity makes the humor bittersweet.
