London Snow Essay Questions

How does the poet use verb tense to convey the image of the snowfall over a prolonged period?

The poem is peppered with gerunds (verbs ending in "ing"), especially in early sections that convey a seemingly endless overnight snowfall. In the very first stanza, the snow “came flying” and is “perpetually settling and loosely lying.” This manipulation of tense evokes the feeling of an eternal present, encompassing both the past and future. Bridges extends this effect in unexpected ways—for instance, by describing the process of making snowballs as “snowballing.” Cumulatively, this creates a feeling of endlessness and suspension in time, helping portray the way the snow alters perceptions of day-to-day reality.

Discuss the use of irony in the poem's concluding line.

At the end of "London Snow," Robert Bridges describes a group of workers so struck by the snow's beauty that they actually break the "charm" of normal urban life. This ironically hints that, despite the seemingly non-magical mundanity and concreteness of daily life and labor in a postindustrial city, this daily life is a mere magic trick. Nature, meanwhile, is not only more powerful but in a sense more real than the man-made city. Through this irony, Bridges proposes that the beautiful and fantastical are neither frivolous nor artificial. Instead, he suggests, they are fundamental to reality—far more so than industry and industrial labor.