Hiding difference, making unevenness even
Into angles and crevices softly drifting and sailing.
The snow blunts and disguises the distinct structures created by industrialization and urbanization. Distinctions that seem important in day-to-day London, marking structures off from one another, disappear so that all of urban life seems minor and undifferentiated. The consonants used in these lines—S, V, F, and L appear frequently—are soft and sibilant, helping to build the sense of softness and smoothness referenced here.
And all woke earlier for the unaccustomed brightness
Of the winter dawning, the strange unheavenly glare:
The eye marvelled—marvelled at the dazzling whiteness;
Though the falling snow itself is peaceful and perpetual, it creates a disruption in the lives of Londoners, waking them up and making them pause to look at the otherworldly beauty around them. The use of the word "unheavenly" is a fascinating trick on the poet's part. It literally denotes sinfulness or earthliness, conveying the strange, intrusive quality of the glaring snow. But it nevertheless recalls heavenliness, mentioning heaven even while negating it and suggesting that the snow is pure, ethereal, and even redolent of eternity or divinity.
The daily thoughts of labour and sorrow slumber
At the sight of the beauty that greets them, for the charm they have broken.
Even while they physically walk to work to engage in the same tasks they do every other day, London's workers actually manage to glimpse another—more fundamental—reality beyond their mundane urban one. Just as the city is constructed out of human labor and imagination, it is exposed as ultimately unreal the moment human imagination is freed from the constraints it imposes.
