Boy at the Window

“Boy at the Window” reflects Wilbur’s belief in the cooperation between a poem’s form and its themes. The poem’s form suggests the theme of separation. Wilbur divides the poem into two equal octets, or eight-line stanzas. Both stanzas are three sentences. Both stanzas share the same tight rhyme scheme: ABBA BCBC. They are mirror stanzas, which suggests the emotional sympatico between the boy and his snowman.

But they do not share perspective. The two stanzas, each one controlled by one of the two characters, enhances the poem’s sense of separation. That formal device creates a feeling of an unbridgeable gap, one in the warm house, the other outside. The thin yet absolute ribbon of white between the two stanzas suggests the window that keeps apart the boy and the snowman.

And although the two stanzas are kept apart, Wilbur slyly introduces quiet (subliminal) cooperation between the two that registers quietly in careful recitation, specifically the use of the near-rhymes from Stanza 1 (“eyes” and “Paradise”) with near-rhymes from Stanza 2 (“cry” and “eye”). Thus, in form the boy and the snowman are physically distant from each other and yet spiritually close.