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.
Themes
The Innocence of Childhood
The boy has plenty of time to learn that a snowman cannot feel. The anxieties of the boy reflect his tender young age. His concern over how the snowman will survive a cold winter night reflects a caring heart still untested by real-time anxieties, a heart that has not been taught its limits. His world, suggested by the warm and inviting room all around him, suggests his sheltered childhood, how he has been protected from the fears and pain that will invariably come. Despite his young age, however, his worry over the snowman is authentic and as real as a child can feel. Too young to understand irony, too innocent to see how relative suffering can be (a snowman, for instance, cannot suffer in the way a person can) are marks not of ignorance but of innocence.
That he conceives of his home as Paradise, as a heaven denied his snowman, again reflects not his ignorance but the sweet naivete of a child and his own presumably religious upbringing. He will have plenty of time to see the problems in his home, problems Wilbur knows as overarching author-ity, are surely there. No home is as perfect as a child assumes it to be. It is easy to dismiss the child’s innocence as hokey sentimentalism. It is the wisdom of Wilbur’s tableau to remind readers that all of us were children once and possessed that keen empathy, the ability to care without agenda and without irony, love that could be extended to friends and family, certainly, but as well to frogs and spiders, stuffed animals, pets, and, yes, the snowman in the backyard. It is only a shame, Wilbur implies, that we are too grown up now to believe such silliness, how innocence, capable of such broad compassion, ultimately, even inevitably becomes ironic.
The Limits of Empathy
Both the boy and the snowman project themselves into the feelings of the other. It is more than compassion: it is empathy, actually transferring feelings, feeling what others are enduring. In both cases, however, empathy fails.
It seems a mark of thin humanity to be against empathy. For most adults, however, empathy looks good on paper but has no relevance in what they term the “real world.” It sounds good: care about others to the point where you see the world as they see it, feel the pain they feel, as a first step in together resolving problems. The poem, however, is not so sure. As well-intentioned and as noble as caring enough for others that you transcend the boundaries that separate people may seem, empathy here is, in the case of the boy, leads to conclusions that are misguided in the most bittersweet way.
To lead with the emotions, to make irrelevant logic and the intellect, creates a world that works better as a fantasy and disinclines a person to work toward solutions through the application of reason. Empathy, here, is the stuff of a children’s story. Wouldn’t it be nice if the boy could help the snowman? Well, no. The boy’s empathy would destroy the snowman. Wouldn’t it be nice if the snowman could reassure the anxious boy that he will be fine in the bitter night? The boy will learn that the next morning when he will find his snowman still in the yard with his stick smile and bitumen eyes.
In the end, empathy conveys the innocent hopes and personifications of a child’s attachment, while also highlighting the sweet limitations of such a youthful perspective.
The Pull of the Material World
Across six decades of poetry, Wilbur refused to concede that the world, which the confessional poets found bleak and the Beat poets found amusingly ironic, was all that bad a place. This world, Wilbur argues, is just wide enough to allow delight. This gentle realism allows the poem to avoid pathos and resist tragedy.
Despite inexplicable anxieties, long nights of fear, uneasiness over the fate of others, and the unshakeable reality of mortality itself—elements that all are part of the thematic weave of “Boy at the Window”—Wilbur responds with a genuine and unaffected love of that same imperfect and anxious world. The poem refuses to over-intellectualize the predicaments of the everyday world, refuses to take all that seriously the dilemmas that drive our lives, evidenced here by the hero being a heap of shaped frozen water. Assisted by a keen ear for the music of traditionally sculpted poetry, which by its definition elevates the everyday into unsuspected import and into a loving kind of gravitas, the poem refuses to find in the boy’s childish concerns for the fate of his backyard snowman or in the reassuring wisdom of that same very inanimate object the stuff of a tragedy. A boy at a frosted window, a snowman with bitumen eyes, a stiff winter wind, nightfall—these everyday objects become the elements of Wilbur’s affirmation that this world has consequence, experience has implication, and embracing this moment—or any moment—has integrity.
In the poem, emotions are not limited to selfish singular perspective. We do not need to limit the perception of ourselves—as the boy too quickly does—within the dark Christian perception that on the earth we are fallen, cursed, pilgrims driven from Paradise. The poem rather offers a winter world, yes, a world of fear, yes, but also a world of warmth, light, and love—a paradise enough.
