Summary
The snow keeps falling throughout the night until it is seven inches thick, lying in light, soft piles. The clouds blow away, and everyone in London wakes up unusually early because of the brightness created by the clear sky and white earth. They are entranced by the appearance of the snow and the silence it creates, and the usual sounds of wheels, footsteps, and voices are gone entirely or very muffled.
Analysis
One of the most distinctive parts of the poem's first long, nine-line sentences was the way it did away with humans. After letting us know that people were asleep in the poem's first line, Bridges portrayed a world without human intervention or even human consciousness. But in this part of the poem, the humans wake up. This action creates an unexpected disruption—a radical occurrence in a poem that has so far centered around the idea of uninterruptedness and seamless continuity. Even more strangely, while the snow itself has so far only created a feeling of muted, undiscriminating peace, that mutedness is actually shocking to the Londoners who wake up and experience it. Therefore, the snow's inactivity in itself becomes the catalyst for a great deal of human mental activity, prompting action via inaction.
In this section of the poem, Bridges ditches many (though by no means all) of the gerunds that powered the poem's first sentence. Instead, he creates immediacy and a feeling of dynamism with verbs like "fell," "woke," and "marvelled." He also lets us know that a change is occurring. Bridges uses a common Italian rhyme scheme called terza rima. It's complex, with new and old rhyming sounds intertwining around each other in the pattern ABA BCB CDC (and so forth, for as long as the poet likes). However, Bridges often chooses to repeat ending sounds rather than introduce new ones right away, so that the poem's initial lines follow a more common ABABAB scheme. Yet, just at the moment when Bridges describes people waking up—disrupting the poem's established, sleepy scene—he also introduces new end rhyme sounds with the words "glare" and "air." By playing with the terza rima's pattern, delaying the introduction of new end rhyme sounds to emphasize an unchanging scene, and then bringing in new rhyming sounds to accompany changes in action, Bridges ensures that his poem's sound qualities match the scene being described.
