Cynthia in the Snow

Brooks opens the poem with a rhyming onomatopoeia: “It SUSHES / It hushes” (Lines 1-2). She does not at any point tell the reader what “it” is, but we can infer from the title that “it” is the snow which surrounds the title character, Cynthia. The sibilants in these rhymed words imitate the sound of snow moving in the wind; they also point out that as the snow falls, it quiets and subdues what is under it. Snow can often have a muffling effect, acting like sound insulation for “loudness in the road” (Line 3). There is some personification used here, the snow being given the human ability to “shush” the cars.

The shushing offers the reader an invitation into the world of experiencing snow, but also forms a metaphor about race—Cynthia, a young Black girl, is also vulnerable to this alluring, white, silencing blanket. The poem comes from Brooks’s collection Bronzeville Boys and Girls, published in 1956, during the American Civil Rights Movement. Its poems offer individual stories about Black children living in Bronzeville, a Black neighborhood in Chicago, in the early-to-mid 20th century. This time period was one of mass silencing of Black voices, but the poem stresses that the snow can never fully subdue the girl observing it.