Snowflakees
"Snow-Flakes": Longfellow's Practical Guide to Grieving
Far from the hypersensitive spirit of popular legend, Longfellow was a practical, intelligent writer who used sentimental forms for pragmatic purposes. The poem "Snow-Flakes" is one of the best examples of this. Written in the wake of the sudden death of Longfellow's wife Fanny, and during the mayhem of the Civil War, "Snow-Flakes" instructs the reader in how to use the natural world to help him or her come to terms with grief. In doing so, Longfellow exposes the heuristic nature of Emersonian transcendence, revealing it to be not a mystic state of divine revelation, but rather a psychological process that, by naturalizing grief, helps bring the reader out of the psychological isolation imposed by grief.
The opening stanza describes the sudden onset of the winter's first storm; it arrives with trumpets blaring, but soon settles into the quiet business of blanketing the earth. This dual action serves Longfellow's......
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Snowflakees
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