Years-End (1950). Content and Description

This poem, which is a meditation on change, decay, and death, begins (appropriately enough) by describing winter’s descent in the form of snowfall on a town. The poem then offers a number of related images of living things frozen (sometimes literally) in time: falling leaves half-trapped in ice, once-living ferns imprinted on rock-solid fossils, wooly mammoths frozen in the arctic, and animals and humans embedded in the ashes of the volcanic eruption of Pompeii. Death, the speaker implies, enters too suddenly for most people, who want “more time” not only to live but to give shape and meaning to their lives—lives that often end all too abruptly.

This poem exhibits many of the virtues of phrasing and form that are so typical of Wilbur’s work, including heavy use of assonance and alliteration (as in line 1), punning phrases (as in the reference to “settlement” in line 2, which can be read as referring both to a town and to a settling action), a highly regular rhyme scheme (abbacc), and an especially emphatic use of iambic pentameter meter (a rhythm in which the line consists of 10 syllables, with the accents usually falling on syllables that are even- numbered).

Often the rhythm in Wilbur’s poems is not so strictly predictable, but in this poem the regular iambic beat gives the work a slow, measured, leisurely pace that seems appropriate to the subject matter, which focuses on the steady and inevitable passage of time. Of course, in poetry as in any other aspect of life, once a regular pattern has been established, any variation from it becomes especially noticeable, and thus Wilbur uses departures from the steady iambic beat to emphasize key words and phrases, as in the double-stressed reference to the “soft street” (l. 3), or the triple-stressed description of “late leaves down” (l. 8), or the strong emphasis on verbs at the very beginnings of lines 10 and 11.

This poem seems unified, however, not only by its conservative stanzaic form and its regular meter but also by its consistent imagery. It opens and closes with reference to snowfall, and indeed downward movement of all kinds is emphasized throughout the work, from the falling of snow and the falling of leaves to the submersion of ferns and mammoths and the falling of the ashes of Vesuvius. Each of the examples discussed in the middle stanzas is merely one more instance of the general themes of mutability and mortality, and so the “argument” of the poem seems supported by the weight of overwhelming evidence.

Yet, the movement of the work is not random: It progresses from a focus on the death of present-day vegetation (the leaves) to the death of vegetation millions of years ago (the ferns) to the death of prehistoric animals (the mammoths) to the death of an ancient animal (the dog at Pompeii) to the death of ancient humans (the people at Pompeii) to the implied death of modern persons, including the speaker and his readers.

Unlike the vegetation and animals, and even unlike the people at Pompeii (caught unaware by the volcanic eruption), the poet and his readers are aware of their impending and unavoidable doom, and indeed in the final stanza the speaker of the poem, who had earlier spoken simply as an individual (in line 7), now makes common cause with his reader (in lines 25-26): It is our awareness of mortality, ironically, that unites us and makes us truly human. In the final line, the “New-year bells” (symbols of the present and future) are juxtaposed with the “snow” (symbol of death) in a way that epitomizes the inescapable paradox of all life, which is vital now but is also doomed to die.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Compare and contrast this work with Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” How is snow imagery used in each work? What does each poem imply about human mortality? How do the rhyme scheme and rhythm contribute to the effectiveness of each work?

2. Compare and contrast this work with Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Snow Man.” Discuss the use of winter imagery in both works and the ways both poets use such imagery as occasions for meditations on existence. What do both poems imply about the nature of human life in particular?

3. Compare and contrast this work with Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem “The Snow Storm.” How is animal imagery used in both works? What role (if any) does death play in both works? How do the poems differ in tone and ultimate implications?