There is a disarming charm to Wilbur’s poem, an unassuming gentleness, even sweetness that would be typical of, say, a fairy tale or a children’s book, more fittingly perhaps, given Wilbur’s extensive catalogue of such books.

Because the snowman, an inanimate object, is gifted with the wisdom of the poem, the poem happily defies the logic of realism and ushers the willing reader into a world of innocence and magic. Drawing on the endearing figure of Frosty the Snowman, the poem creates a fantasy world that, nevertheless, like all children’s stories, illuminates a very adult world. In this case, the poem tests the difficult and very grown-up dynamic of bittersweet empathy, that complex feeling of stepping entirely out of yourself and caring deeply and personally about the dilemmas that others face even when, or particularly if, you are helpless to actually alleviate that suffering.

The boy (he is given no name or personal background, in keeping with the children’s book ambience) sits at the window of his comfortable home and frets over the bleak fate facing the snowman he built. Because he is the snowman’s creator, he feels an inexplicable urgency to his fretting—in a way he cannot entirely grasp, he feels responsible for the snowman being in his yard; he coaxed him into being from what were otherwise heaps of formless snow.