Analysis Of The Poem Winter Morning By Billy Collins

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The tone of the poem, at the beginning, has a very sad feeling to it. It shows this by using imagery to display the reality of the situation. The starting lines suggest that it is probably not going to be a good day “Winter mornings” (1). Winter is usually associated with terms such as the dark season. In the medieval ages, for example, winter is when the crops stop growing and the time most people freeze to death. As for the poem, the winter morning could signify as a bad omen of sorts foreshadowing events later to come. Later on in the story, the main character sees “kids huddled like grouse in the plowed ruts in front of their shack waiting for the bus” (3-7) which would bring anyone seeing this sight into an unhappy mood. The children hugging each other for warmth means that the clothes are not layered enough to keep them from the cold. Just seeing the scene of kids freezing is enough for anyone feel pity for them. Adding on to the heartbreak of seeing kids shivering, the poem implies that they are poor. The shack provides evidence that the kids’ are poor; this is because if the kids’ family cannot even afford a decent house, odds are they cannot provide proper clothing. …show more content…

The whole second part of the story is a setup to a joke. When the main character sees the children “he slowed to wave and the smallest, a stick of a kid draped in a coat, grinned and raised” the audience’s expectations are that the children wave then the story moves on. But in this case, instead of responding with a hand wave, the kids respond using a snowball. It is funny because usually someone waves at another to greet the other person. Normally people do not respond in an over exaggerated and random way, which in turn makes the set up

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