Winter snow themed poems use imagery examples to bring to the reader the scene of a nostalgic winter snow from the poet’s own experiences. Often the imagery portrays emotions, senses, and encounters from moments remembered.

Seven forms of imagery:

  1. Visual imagery – something seen in the mind’s eye
  2. Auditory imagery – represents a sound
  3. Olfactory imagery – a smell
  4. Gustatory imagery – a taste
  5. Tactile imagery – touch, for example hardness, softness, wetness, heat, cold
  6. Organic imagery – internal sensation: hunger, thirst, fatigue, fear
  7. Kinesthetic imagery – movement or tension

Which of the imagery examples can you find as you read the following winter snow themed poems?

4 Imagery Examples | Classic Winter Snow Themed Poems

Imagery Examples #1

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

by Robert Frost
1874-1963

Stopping by woods these are I think I know
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Imagery Examples #2

Velvet Shoes

by Elinor Wylie
1885-1928

Let us walk in the white snow
In a soundless space;
With footsteps quiet and slow,
At a tranquil pace,
Under veils of white lace.

I shall go shod in silk,
And you in wool,
White as a white cow’s milk,
More beautiful
Than the breast of a gull.

We shall walk through the still town
In a windless place;
We shall step upon white down,
Upon silver fleece,
Upon softer than these.

We shall walk in velvet shoes:
Wherever we go
Silence will fall like dews
On white silence below.
We shall walk in the snow.

Imagery Examples #3

Snow-flakes

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
1807-1882

Out of the bosom of the Air,
Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
Silent and soft and slow
Descends the snow.

Even as our cloudy fancies take
Suddenly shape in some divine expression,
Even as the troubled heart doth make
In the white countenance confession,
The troubled sky reveals
The grief it feels.

This is the poem of the air,
Slowly in silent syllables recorded;
This is the secret of despair,
Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded,
Now whispered and revealed
To wood and field.

Imagery Examples #4

To a Snowflake

by Francis Thompson
1859-1907

What heart could have thought you?–
Past our devisal
(O filigree petal!)
Fashioned so purely,
From what Paradisal
Imagineless metal,
Too costly for cost?
Who hammered you, wrought you,
From argentine vapor?–
“God was my shaper.
Passing surmisal,
He hammered. He wrought me,
From curled silver vapor,
To lust of His mind:–
Thou could’st not have thought me!
So purely, so palely,
Tinily, surely,
Mightily, frailly,
Insculped and embossed,
With His hammer of wind,
And His graver of frost.”