From the opening stanzas, nature looms large in Whittier’s vision; its power is palpable, its reach dramatic and intrusive. Even as the brothers hustle to secure the barn just ahead of the gathering storm, the horizon turns an oppressive gray, the rapidly thickening sky offers a “mute and ominous prophecy” (6). The two-day storm is captured with vivid, naturalistic detailing—this is no metaphorical storm. This is a classic, brutal New England nor’easter. Whittier recreates the blizzard with exactness and specificity. The bitter wind shrieks, blasting off the ocean; the “moaning” (103) tree limbs sway blindly in the furious squalls; an Arctic cold grips the farm (“a chill no coat, however stout / Of homespun stuff could quite shut out” [9 -10]); the steady drifting snow transfigures the farmyard; the sun quickly becomes ironic and useless.

Nature is at once capable of great power and transfiguring beauty. Within nature’s vast realm, humanity, represented by the family and the boarders who gather about the hearth safe and secure, certainly, but marooned nonetheless, “shut in from all the world without” (155), struggles just to adjust, struggles to respond. Humanity is essentially, existentially helpless, vulnerable. Even as this storm passes, even as the teams of oxen plow through the leaden drifts to make clear the roads, even as the world appears to move back to normal in the closing stanzas, there lingers the unsettling reality that nature still waits to flex its power again.