Cynthia in the Snow

Brooks opens the poem with a rhyming onomatopoeia: “It SUSHES / It hushes” (Lines 1-2). She does not at any point tell the reader what “it” is, but we can infer from the title that “it” is the snow which surrounds the title character, Cynthia. The sibilants in these rhymed words imitate the sound of snow moving in the wind; they also point out that as the snow falls, it quiets and subdues what is under it. Snow can often have a muffling effect, acting like sound insulation for “loudness in the road” (Line 3). There is some personification used here, the snow being given the human ability to “shush” the cars.

The shushing offers the reader an invitation into the world of experiencing snow, but also forms a metaphor about race—Cynthia, a young Black girl, is also vulnerable to this alluring, white, silencing blanket. The poem comes from Brooks’s collection Bronzeville Boys and Girls, published in 1956, during the American Civil Rights Movement. Its poems offer individual stories about Black children living in Bronzeville, a Black neighborhood in Chicago, in the early-to-mid 20th century. This time period was one of mass silencing of Black voices, but the poem stresses that the snow can never fully subdue the girl observing it. As Joseph T. Thomas puts it in Poetry's Playground, “though the snow ‘SUSHES’ and ‘hushes,’ the child is not silenced. Cynthia still speaks” (Joseph T. Thomas, Poetry’s Playground; Page 14).

The poet uses rhyme once more in Line 4, when the snow “twitter-flitters,” instilling a sense of magic and beauty—and bringing to mind playful childhood sing-song. Cynthia sees the snow and the whiteness as beautiful and desirable, but it is unattainable as it “laughs away” (Line 5) from her. Brooks takes care to repeat that the snow is laughing, writing it again in Line 6: “It laughs a lovely whiteness.” Brooks is using personification for the snow, instilling in it a human quality. The snow’s laughter and seemingly conscious movement has two simultaneous readings: It instills a fairytale or folktale sense of magic, imbuing an inanimate object with sapience, and it strengthens the racial allusion as the white flakes are very close to laughing at Cynthia as they dodge away from her. Either way, there is something exclusionary about the laughter: Only the snow is laughing; Cynthia may wish to be included, but she does not report laughing along. The poet uses alliteration in Line 7, as the snow “whitely whirls away.” The repetition of laughter and whiteness drives home the idea that Cynthia sees whiteness as joyful and desirable, as a contrast to her, and as something she cannot have or be.

The snowflakes are in constant movement away from Cynthia, like a receding horizon, or sand through the fingers. They are disappearing to “some otherwhere” (Line 9). The use of “otherwhere,” an antiquated term already in 1956, reinforces the sense of magic introduced earlier. There is a sense that Cynthia is catching the snow in an unguarded, special, otherworldly moment, while it is on its way to this mythical “otherwhere” and while it is “Still as white as milk or shirts” (Line 10)—the word “still” implies that Cynthia understands that soon the fallen snow will mix with the road dust and become muddy. The poem’s speaker compares the snow to accessible objects any child would know—clean laundry and cow milk. Both items are also deeply culturally associated with images of purity. This tells us that Cynthia has internalized notions of whiteness being clean and something not necessarily intended for her (as she perceives the snow fleeing her presence to somewhere else).

The closing line, “So beautiful it hurts” touches on the complex feelings Cynthia is experiencing. The white snow is beautiful and desirable, but she sees it as a rare, almost forbidden, and unprecedented treat to get to experience its presence before it leaves for some better, more magical place. Cynthia is projecting onto the snow the painful feeling of not being good enough; having reached an age where she can understand the world in greater complexity, Cynthia is old enough to suffer mixed emotions like bittersweetness—or a beautiful pain, as the last line puts it. “The snow and the whiteness it represents call attention to Cynthia’s own dark skin, her feelings of inadequacy, feelings that are cold and hurtful” (Joseph T. Thomas, Poetry's Playground; Page 14). Cynthia is not silenced, however, as her experience and emotions are expressions.