Boy at the Window

This reading response to a poem is going to be on Richard Wilbur's poem, "Boy at the Window". This poem is about a young boy who becomes sad after seeing a snowman alone outside in a snow storm. Richard Wilbur said he wrote this poem, "after seeing how distressed his five-year old son was about a snowman they had built (Clugston, R.W., 2010)." This poem was made in response to Richard Wilbur's own, "life experiences (Clugston, R.W., 2010)." Boy at the Window shows how it can draw strong feelings when reading it by the use of different metaphors and other literary elements.

This poem starts off by giving you the young boy's point of view and then the snowman's point of view. The statement, "Seeing the snowman, standing all alone (Clugston, R.W., 2010)," is what the young boy's point of view is. It is also starting off from an omniscient outsider perspective because he is giving you the overall tone of a dark and cold night. In the first few lines it allows you to think that the young boy is crying about how terrified the snowman may be feeling.

Reading, "The small boy weeps to hear the wind prepare (Clugston, R.W., 2010)," made me think that he cried because of the noise the wind was making. I was able to understand that maybe the he also was sad because with the, "enormous moan, (Clugston, R.W., 2010)," of the wind might knock the snowman down.

The snowman's point of view is explained when Wilbur states, "Having no wish to go inside and die." It comes across to the boy that maybe he can be crying to when Wilbur states, "He melts enough to drop from one soft eye a trickle of the purest rain, a tear (Clugston, R.W., 2010)." With this explanation I think that Richard Wilbur used the literary term personification. In our textbook personification is defined as, "a figure of speech formed when qualities normally associated with a person are attributed to abstract things or inanimate objects (Clugston, R.W., 2010)."

This poem also shows the reader that there are similarities between the young boy and the snowman. The lines that allowed me to see similarity were lines three and four and nine through eleven I think that it shows how they both have pity for each other's life but also misunderstanding each other's life. This poem allowed for the reader to get perspective on what the snowman may be feeling as he stands outside all alone.

In conclusion, this young boy and the snowman that was left outside have different lives but they both don't understand the other's life at all. Being a young boy at the age of five it is hard to understand that not all things are like we are. This poem shows you how much the young boy cared for this snowman who is nothing like him. Any poem that has different elements of literacy such as metaphor's, personifications,