Boy at the Window

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost (1923)

The American poet Wilbur is most often compared with, Frost’s winter poem shows how close the two poets were in their respect for traditional prosody but how far apart they were in temperament. Wilbur rejected the dark and forbidding pessimism of Frost’s winter, here suggesting emptiness and death.

“A Fire-Truck” by Richard Wilbur (1947)

Although virtually any Wilbur poem from the 1940s and 1950s would reveal his love of the ordinary things of this world, here the poet revels in a noisy fire truck that passes by. Suddenly, gripped by surprise, the poet confesses all his broodings, his heartaches, all vanish. And he says happily to the disappearing truck, “I have you to thank.”

“Winter Landscape, with Rooks” by Sylvia Plath (1956)

Published two years after Wilbur’s “Boy at the Window,” this poem is by one of the era’s most respected confessional poets. Compared to Wilbur’s sweet and gentle tone, this winter poem savages hope and dwells on the bleakness of the season as an embodiment of some non-specified wounding of the poet’s heart.