Summary
Now, as people head off to start work, they fight against the snow rather than embrace it. Men form a long line, creating a trail of brown through the white snow as they walk. Still, even though they're going to their jobs in the city, they don't feel stressed and aren't even really thinking about work. They're too busy looking at the beauty of the snow, which seems to have broken a spell and thus allowed these men newfound freedom.
Analysis
In these closing lines, Bridges describes a group of people very different from the innocent, playful schoolboys of the previous sentence. Rather than playing in the snow, these laborers have to fight their way through it, treating it as an obstacle so that they can go to their jobs. Perhaps because they're also older and more jaded, these men don't yell out loud about the snow like the schoolchildren: they're quiet and "sombre." But in a way, this makes the effect of the snow upon them even more surprising and radical. Even while the city around them persists, driving them to make the daily trek to their jobs, the snow completely alters their relationship to that urban environment. It frees them in a fundamental, if entirely internal, way. By demonstrating nature's power, the snow actually exposes postindustrial London as a kind of illusion, as demonstrated in the poem's last phrase: "for the charm they have broken."
The snow, in other words, not only breaks the city's "charm" (or spell) but does the important work of actually showing that the charm exists. It makes contemporary urban life seem like a mere magic trick, thereby liberating workers from its demands. Bridges inverts the grammar of this final phrase, saying "the charm they have broken" rather than "they have broken the charm." This inversion helps the poem stick to its rhyme scheme, pairing "unspoken" and "broken," but it also allows the poem to end with (and therefore emphasize) the word "broken" rather than the word "charm." Thus, he stresses the triumph of the charm-breaking snow, leaving readers to ruminate on the charm's brokenness. Furthermore, the poem's last line is markedly longer than those that come before it, coming in at eighteen syllables. In this sense, it breaks the visual and auditory pattern that has been established, breaking the poem's form in imitation of the way the snow breaks the city's charm.
