ENJOYING A NEW ENGLAND WINTER BACK IN THE DAY—SNOW-BOUND. I posted here on January 30 about a post on the You Knew What I Meant blog in which RAB chose several of her favorite poems about snow. Boston had just gotten two and a half feet of snow from one storm. Since then it has kept snowing with Boston and Massachusetts getting the brunt of it. This article from February 20 on the Daily Mail site describes, with photographs, the snow and cold in the eastern part of the United States. One of the pictures is of a frozen Niagara Falls. Boston has had over 8 feet of snow so far this winter. Some people are enjoying the snow. A new sport in Boston consists of jumping out a second or third story window into a snowbank (see this article in USA Today by Lindsay Deutsch).
Here is one of the poems that RAB recommended: Snow-bound by John Greenleaf Whittier. The poem was published in 1865 and recalls Whittier’s childhood in Massachusetts in the earlier part of the 1800’s. The poem describes treasured memories of a happy family clustered around their hearth during and after a two day snow storm, while “Shut in from all the world without”. The full name of the poem is Snow-bound: A Winter Idyl.