Robert Frost\'s Wind and Window

Robert Frost's "Wind and Window Flower" dramatizes the conflicts between stability and change, between love and death, and between subtle and dramatic strength. Personifying the wind and the window flower, the poet transforms observations of the natural world into characters in a story. The narrator addresses the audience directly in the first two lines, "Lovers, forget your love, / and list to the love of these, / She a window flower, / and he a winter breeze." The speaker proceeds to relay the tale of a window flower and the winter wind, which seeks to uproot the tiny, delicate blossom. Through the story and its rich metaphors and imagery, the speaker evokes appreciation for natural seasonal cycles as well as for the cycles of the day. The speaker also conveys the central themes of the poem, including that of the triumph of love over death. Flowers often symbolize eternal life, while the wind is often a powerful harbinger of change, transformation, and death. The poem is set in the wintertime and contains imagery of frost and cold, accentuating the contrast between the winter wind and its pray, a tiny flower. In fact, the flower and its counterpart, a "caged yellow bird," are out of place in this scene, for both colorful objects invoke spring and new life rather than the death and decay suggested by the season of winter (line 7). Furthermore, the poet ascribes gender to the wind and the window flower: the former is male, the latter female, which underscores the symbolic aggression on the part of the male wind. In the end, the flower secures a passive victory, as it "leaned aside, / and thought of naught to say," (lines 25-26). Therefore, the purpose of the narrative is to illustrate the potential triumph of humility and peace over brute force.

The poem consists of seven stanzas of four lines each. Each line has either six or seven syllables, but there is no strict regularity of syllables per line. The poem has a definite and compelling rhythm that helps dramatize the central narrative: the story of the wind and the window flower. Just as a deft storyteller will captivate his or her audience with the rhythmic intonations of the voice, so too does the narrator of the poem captivate the audience through poetic rhythm. The first stanza of the poem differs from the rest in both meaning and in rhythm, as in this stanza the narrator addresses the audience directly as an introduction to the tale. The lines consist of alternating iambs, trochees, anapests and dactyls. For example, the first line of the poem contains in succession a trochaic, an iambic, and an anapestic foot, whereas the second line contains in succession an iambic, anapestic, and dactylic foot. The third line differs even yet, with a two trochaic feet followed by an anapestic one. The irregularity of the meter in the first stanza creates suspension of the type all good storytellers want in order to compel their audiences to listen. The remainder of the poem assumes a more regularly rhythmic form, although the meter is not strict. Some of the remaining lines and stanzas follow an iambic hexameter, such as stanza three. However, many of the lines are in anapestic hexameter, or contain combinations of various meters. The poet inserts dactylic and anapestic feet along with iambic and also trochaic ones for intensity and variation, much as one would read a bedside story to a child.

Throughout the poem/story the narrator uses active voice, encouraging the listener to become further absorbed in the tale. Moreover, the active voice dramatizes the personification of the wind and window flower, the male and female protagonists in the tale. For instance, "He marked her through the pane," (line 9). When the speaker addresses the audience he uses imperative verbs: "Lovers, forget your love," (line 1). Although the wind performs most of the action in the poem, the flower is more like the hero in her passive, peaceful form of victory: "But the flower leaned aside... / and morning found the breeze / a hundred miles away," (lines 25; 27-28). In the last two lines of the poem, moreover, the fierce winter wind becomes once again a mere "breeze," as he was at the onset of the poem. As a breeze, he seems harmless, even kind, a far cry from his being "Concerned with ice and snow, / Dead weeds and unmated birds, / and little of love could know," (lines 14-16).