Snowbound: A Winter Idyl

Today if I were still teaching High School I would have taken a break from whatever lesson I had planned and read to my classes Snowbound: A Winter Idyl by the poet John Greenleaf Whittier. The poem describes an approaching snowstorm and its aftermath and a turn of the century farm family's response to it. The poem is filled with beautiful language and imagery and celebrates a way of life that even in the late 1800's Whittier knew was vanishing.

The students would have been on edge as soon as they arrived at school waiting to be dismissed early and resentful that they were even in school at all. But by the time I had gotten a few stanzas into the poem they would usually be listening attentively.

We would end the class with a discussion of the ways people respond to an approaching snowstorm today. My students would always come up with a rich and varied catalogue of images and stories of past snowstorms in their lives and how they and their families and friends reacted. We would follow up the discussion with an assignment to create a modern version of Whittier's poem in prose or verse. These assignments resulted in some of the best work I saw all year. One of the true joys of being an English teacher and something I'll always remember.