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“Snowdrop” Introduction
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"Snowdrop," by the English poet Ted Hughes, is a short poem describing the effects of a harsh winter landscape on various creatures. A mouse, weasel, and crow all struggle against the cold and darkness, while a personified snowdrop flower seems to be the only match for winter's brutality. This is no delicate flower but a hardy bloom whose white petals the speaker deems "heavy as metal." As is typical of Hughes's work, the poem doesn't romanticize nature, nor does it contain an explicit lesson for humanity. Instead, it depicts the harsh reality of survival in an unforgiving natural world. The poem was published in Hughes's second collection, Lupercal, in 1960.
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“Snowdrop” Summary
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At this very moment, the entire world is constricting into a tight grip around a mouse's heart, the beating of which has grown slow and muted as it hunkers down for the winter. Weasels and crows, seemingly molded out of metal, move through the gloomy landscape outside as though deranged, walking alongside all the other dying things. The snowdrop flower also strives to accomplish her goals, savage as the constellation she was born under, her white petals so heavy they seem to be made of metal.
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“Snowdrop” Themes
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The Brutality of Nature and the Struggle to Survive
“Snowdrop” portrays a bitter winter landscape in which various animals (including a mouse, weasel, and crow) struggle to survive. The whole world seems braced against “darkness” and the threat of death, down to the snowdrop of the poem's title (a small flower that blooms in winter). Unlike the animals, this flower thrives in these conditions by imitating the harshness of its environment, her petals hanging "heavy as metal" in the surrounding cold. In one reading, the poem simply acknowledges that all living things are doing their best to withstand the cruel brutality of nature. It's also possible that the poem is making a commentary on how brutality engenders more brutality, and how it takes fierce, steely determination to thrive in a merciless world.
The winter of the poem is harsh and unforgiving. It seems, to the speaker, as though “the globe”—the entire world itself—has "shrunk tight," wrapped like a fist "[r]ound the mouse’s dulled wintering heart." This image likens the world to a predator; like a bird of prey, it's squeezing the life out of a mouse, whose heart slows in the cold.
Meanwhile, a weasel and crow “[m]ove through an outer darkness,” trudging the landscape as though “moulded in brass.” The animals appear heavy, stiff, and slow with cold, and there's no light to assist them in their journeys. These conditions, understandably, render them a little mad. They're "[n]ot in their right minds" as they wander around “[w]ith the other deaths”—a phrase nodding to the lifeless winter world that surrounds them and also ominously suggests that these creatures are on the brink of death themselves.
The tiny snowdrop, a flower that blooms in mid-winter, also “pursues her ends”—that is, attempts to survive the cold, unforgiving conditions. Unlike the mouse, weasel, and crow, however, the snowdrop, personified as a female figure, seems to be a match for the ruthless environment she grows in. The flower is as “[b]rutal as the stars of this month,” perhaps indicating that she's been specifically made for winter, born as she is under this particular set of “stars.” (Hughes was very interested in astrology, which holds that the stars you're born under determine your character and fate.)
It seems that the snowdrop survives by adopting the harshness of the world around her. The speaker says that “[h]er pale head is heavy as metal,” a striking way to describe the flower's white, downturned petals. As with the reference to a weasel and crow made from "brass," this image speaks to the way that winter hardens living things. Yet in the flower's case, this hardening seems to be an advantage. Despite her delicate appearance, the simile implies that she's strong and resilient. Indeed, even her name makes her seem like simply a part of the winter landscape.
The fact that this flower is white and blooming from the earth in winter might be read as symbolic of the resilience of life itself. Alternatively, this hardy flower might reflect how a cruel, icy world favors hardened creatures. In yet another reading, the poem is just exploring the universal struggle to survive. Indeed, even as the snowdrop seems to contrast with the animals from earlier in the poem, the speaker never actually praises one creature's method of survival over another. In fact, the poem doesn’t romanticize any aspect of nature; as far as the speaker is concerned, it all seems pretty equally grim.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-8
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Snowdrop”
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Lines 1-2
Now is the ...
... dulled wintering heart."Snowdrop" begins by setting a chilly scene. Note how this description of a winter landscape quickly goes from being quite vast and abstract to small and specific:
Now is the globe shrunk tight
Round the mouse's dulled wintering heart.The speaker describes the entire "globe"—or world—as if it's contracting, like a hand being squeezed into a fist, around a little mouse's heart. The enjambment here subtly evokes that constriction, the first line seeming to exert its grip around the following.
This mouse is hunkered down for the winter, its heartbeat slow and muted to preserve energy and warmth. The world has perhaps "shrunk" in the sense that nothing matters to this little creature beyond its immediate survival.
Listen to the assonance here as well:
Now is the globe shrunk tight
Round the mouse's dulled wintering heart.That broad /ow/ sound adds intensity to the poem's language and also mimics the shrinking of the world itself; just as the speaker's description goes from very broad in line 1 to very specific in line 2, so too do these /ow/ sounds go from wide to narrow (just try saying "now" out loud and feel what happens to the shape of your mouth!). In this way, assonance evokes the very contracting that the speaker is describing.
These lines also form a rhyming couplet, though readers might not actually catch the rhyme at first: "tight" is only a vague slant rhyme with "heart." The poem will rely on subtly rhymed couplets like this throughout, as though the rhyme sounds themselves have been "dulled" alongside the hearts of the poem's "wintering" animals.
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Lines 3-5
Weasel and crow, ...
... their right minds,
Unlock all 256 words of this analysis of Lines 3-5 of “Snowdrop,” and get the Line-by-Line Analysis for every poem we cover.
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Line 6
With the other ... pursues her ends,
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Lines 7-8
Brutal as the ...
... heavy as metal.
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“Snowdrop” Symbols
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The Stars
In this poem, the "stars" might symbolize the unfeeling nature of the universe, which gazes down on the creatures trying to survive below. Unlike the animals that are barely clinging to life, the "[b]rutal" stars burn bright regardless of the time of year, unchanging and unaffected by the seasons. The speaker doesn't portray their constancy as a comfort but rather as a reminder that nothing that happens on earth has any impact on the vast "outer darkness" that contains the "stars" above.
At the same time, "the stars of this month" refers not just to stars in general, but to a specific constellation associated with a certain time of the year. In other words, the poem is referencing astrology—the belief that the arrangement of celestial objects in the sky upon a person's birth affects who they are and will become. In this way, the "stars" in this poem also symbolize fate, perhaps implying that the snowdrop is "[b]rutal" because she is destined to survive.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 7: “Brutal as the stars of this month,”
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“Snowdrop” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Assonance
Assonance adds rhythm and intensity to the poem's language while also calling attention to certain images. Listen to the repeated /ow/ sounds in the first two lines, for example:
Now is the globe shrunk tight
Round the mouse's dulled wintering heart.Note the shape the mouth makes while saying these words ("Now," "Round," "mouse's"): broad and open at first, followed by a closing in around the /w/ sound. This motion subtly mimics the shrinking of the "globe," which tightens like a fist around the "mouse's" slowing "heart."
The assonance here also just adds some interesting music to the poem, drawing the reader into this setting. The same is true of the long /o/ sounds of "crow"/"moulded" and the /oo/ sounds of "[m]ove through" and "too, pursues."
There's then another striking string of assonance in the final line of the poem, where the speaker repeats the short /eh/ sound:
Her pale head heavy as metal.
There's alliteration here as well, on the huffing /h/ sound. Altogether, the intense sonic repetition of this line adds weight to the poem's final moments. The insistence of these sounds perhaps evokes the resilience and perseverance of the snowdrop flower itself.
Where assonance appears in the poem:- Line 1: “Now”
- Line 2: “Round,” “mouse’s”
- Line 3: “crow,” “moulded”
- Line 4: “Move through”
- Line 6: “deaths,” “too, pursues,” “ends”
- Line 8: “head heavy,” “metal”
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Alliteration
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Simile
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Personification
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Enjambment
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Caesura
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“Snowdrop” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Snowdrop
- Wintering
- Moulded
- Right minds
- Pursues her ends
Snowdrop-
(Location in poem: )
A small, white flower that blooms in winter.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Snowdrop”
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Form
"Snowdrop" consists of eight lines of free verse, lumped into a single stanza. Although there are no stanza breaks here, readers can also think of the poem as being made up of four couplets (or two-line stanzas) due to the poet's use of end rhymes (all of which are subtle—more on that in a minute!).
The tight, compact nature of the poem echoes the shrinking of "the globe" that the speaker describes in line 1, which seems to constrict like a fist around animals in winter. The poem, like the lives it describes, is brief and brutal.
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Meter
As a free verse poem, "Snowdrop" does not use meter. This is true for most contemporary poetry and for most of Hughes's poems as well. While the steady rhythms created by meter might suggest a predictable, well-ordered universe, the unmetered verse here is an appropriate match for a poem about the unforgiving reality of survival. That is, the poem's lack of meter allows its brutality to shine through; there's no soothing music here to romanticize the natural world.
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Rhyme Scheme
Although it might be hard to hear at first, "Snowdrop" does actually have a rhyme scheme. It consists of four rhyming couplets: AABB and so on.
That said, all of these end rhymes are very slant. For example, "tight" is rhymed with "heart," and "minds" with "ends." Reading it aloud, the effect is much more subtle than if full rhymes had been used instead. It's almost as though the rhymes here have been buried in a layer of snow, muffled by winter alongside the little mouse's "dulled wintering heart."
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“Snowdrop” Speaker
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The speaker of this poem is anonymous and genderless. They're an impartial, seemingly omniscient observer describing this brutal winter scene. Readers aren't really thinking about the speaker at all; the focus here is on nature.
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“Snowdrop” Setting
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The poem takes place in a stark winter landscape. It's cold and dark; the world itself seems to be "shrunk tight," constricted like a fist around the "heart" of hibernating creatures. A weasel and crow trudge "through an outer darkness" and aren't "in their right minds," suggesting the disorienting nature of this winter world. Surrounding them are "other deaths," an ominous statement reflecting the fact that winter is a time of stillness. There's also a little snowdrop flower, a perhaps unexpected sign of growth and life in this bleak world. The flower is "[b]rutal" as the indifferent stars above, however, its white, downturned petals hanging like heavy bits of metal.
The speaker doesn't say where in the world this scene is occurring nor if the poem is meant to describe a single night or many. This cold, harsh environment could occur in many different places, at many different times, and may even be interpreted metaphorically (i.e., the "winter" could represent a difficult time in a person's life). What's clear is that the natural world of this poem is a harsh, unforgiving place.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Snowdrop”
Literary Context
The English poet Ted Hughes (1930-1998) is considered one of the foremost writers of the 20th century. His arrival on the scene with his 1957 debut, The Hawk in the Rain, was a shock to the system of British poetry; Hughes's raw imagery challenged the dominance of more restrained and formal poets like Philip Larkin. To this day, Hughes remains one of the most widely read poets in the English language. "Snowdrop" first appeared in Lupercal, Ted Hughes's second collection of poetry, in 1960.
Hughes grew up in West Riding, Yorkshire, a relatively rural part of England, and he cultivated an early interest in the natural world that would influence his poetry. Hughes was both reverent and unsentimental about the natural world, seeing it not just as a source of wisdom and beauty (as the 19th-century Romantics like William Wordsworth often did), but also as a place full of instinctive violence and danger. Animals also occupy a central role in Hughes's poetry (most famously in the "Crow" series of poems), where they often symbolically reflect the human psyche.
Hughes was deeply influenced by the work of his wife, fellow poet Sylvia Plath. Over the course of their (often tormented) marriage, the pair produced a rich, unsettling body of work. Both were inspired by the English countryside in which they set up home. The domestic strife between Hughes and Plath became a key subject in both poets' work as well, including in Plath’s Ariel (published posthumously after her 1963 suicide) and Hughes’s Birthday Letters (1998). Some might even interpret the "[b]rutal" and "pale head[ed]" figure at the end of this poem as a reference to Plath, who, like Hughes, had a keen interest in astrology.
Historical Context
Over the course of his long and prolific career (which ran from the 1950s until his death in 1998), Hughes saw wild social change. He began publishing his poetry during a period of rapid post-war urbanization and industrialization. Britain had a booming manufacturing industry in products as diverse as ships, cars, metals, and textiles, but with this boom came increasing pollution. Hughes's poetry, with its interest in wild nature and animal instinct, might be read as a skeptical rejoinder to a post-war enthusiasm for civilizing, scientific progress.
Grim as the outlook of poems like "Snowdrop" might be, Hughes’s choice to become a poet largely stemmed from his love of nature. Even in its harshest moments, nature attracted him as a source of inspiration and awe. Hughes grew up hunting animals, but he soon found that the thrill of chasing an animal was deflated by the result. Rather than trap or kill wild creatures, he preferred to portray the essence of their wildness and to explore the deep bond he felt with nature. In this way, he found poetry better suited to his aims.
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More “Snowdrop” Resources
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External Resources
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A Reading of the Poem — Listen to a recording of the poem read aloud.
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The Snowdrop Flower — Learn more about the flower that inspired this poem.
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British Library Archives for Ted Hughes — Peruse the British Library's archives on Hughes, which contain biographical information and additional resources (including writing about the influence of war and mythology on Hughes's work).
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An Introduction to the Poet's Life — Head over to the Poetry Foundation's website to read a brief biography of Hughes.
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A Documentary About Hughes's Life and Work — This BBC documentary investigates how Hughes's life shaped his poetry.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Ted Hughes
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