Theme of this poem?????? Winter Sleep?

When against earth a wooden heel


Clicks as loud as stone on steel,


When stone turns flour instead of flakes,


And frost bakes clay as fire bakes,


When the hard-bitten fields at last


Crack like iron flawed in the cast,


When the world is wicked and cross and old,


I long to be quit of the cruel cold.





Little birds like bubbles of glass


Fly to other Americas,


Birds as bright as sparkles of wine


Fly in the nite to the Argentine,


Birds of azure and flame-birds go


To the tropical Gulf of Mexico:


They chase the sun, they follow the heat,


It is sweet in their bones, O sweet, sweet, sweet!


It's not with them that I'd love to be,


But under the roots of the balsam tree.





Just as the spiniest chestnut-burr


Is lined within with the finest fur,


So the stoney-walled, snow-roofed house


Of every squirrel and mole and mouse


Is lined with thistledown, sea-gull's feather,


Velvet mullein-leaf, heaped together


With balsam and juniper, dry and curled,


Sweeter than anything else in the world.





O what a warm and darksome nest


Where the wildest things are hidden to rest!


It's there that I'd love to lie and sleep,


Soft, soft, soft, and deep, deep, deep!

Theme of this poem?????? Winter Sleep?
Wouldn't the theme just be winter? Or the changes that occur in winter?
Reply:What a fascinating work! It is deeper and more complex than just a look at nature in winter. The speaker in the poem rejects the idea of migration. And chooses to "lie and sleep"


The implication here is that "sleep" is equivalent to death-- a rest from the world with all its hardness. Note that the poem begins with harsh syllables and images and ends with "soft".


Death offers respite from a harsh world.


Two of the author's siblings committed suicide, and the other attempted suicide but was saved.
Reply:The outlining theme could be considered winter however, if you look and delve in closer there is an inner theme present. I would say that the poem in addition has to do with a journey. It talks about changes and evolution. The birds in the second stanza tells the audience about a comparison to the place where the writer wants to be. I would say that the overarching theme is journey. The journeying of the birds and the end of a journey when it says of the desire to lie and sleet at the end.





Hope this helps:)