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Snow By Louis Macneeice Essay

Decent Essays

A poem is an experience, not a thought. It is an experience both the author and the reader share with one another. Authors of poems use tones, keywords, hidden messages, irony, and diction to create their work. They use these tactics so the reader thinks about what they are reading and try evaluating what the message is that the reader wants to get across. In the poem “Snow” by Louis MacNeice, he uses these same characteristics to get the readers mind active in the words. Let’s examine the poem “Snow” and see what the meaning behind this poem is. To begin thinking about this poem, we should stop and try to imagine the background of the poem. A tone could include mysterious, since the meaning is not seen right away, but it could also be thoughtful because he allows us to think in a different way. We know there is a main character which could be the author, but are not given his name. The setting is at a house where the first snowfall is mixing with the flowers left from the summertime. The time-period is not given to us in the poem, so we are unsure of that. Finally, when thinking about why MacNeice wrote this poem we can see there is a connection between the weather he is seeing outside and the world around us. The title is very simple and can cause any reader to think the same thing. Snow according the Merriam Webster Dictionary, the word snow has one main definition. Snow is “the precipitation in the form of small white crystals formed directly from the water vapor of the air at a temperature less than 32 degrees.” In other words, it is the frozen crystals that fall from the sky during the winter season. Just by the title we should be able to tell what the poem will be about, but MacNeice puts a turn on the wording of the poem to catch the reader off guard. This raises the question if MacNeice wanted the poem to be about a snowfall, or does he have a deeper meaning underneath the title? As the poem continues there will be more references at what the poem is about. The first sentence gives the reader an oxymoron to think about. MacNeice talks about spawning snow, which we could figure out from the title, but he also includes the thought of spawning pink roses against a window. This can be confusing to

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