18 pages • 36 minutes read
Gwendolyn BrooksCynthia in the Snow
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1956A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Childhood and Black Joy
“Cynthia in the Snow” is about the childhood experience of joy—its primary image is that of a young Black girl enjoying snowfall. The poem strikes modern readers as touching on Black Joy, a contemporary term for the age-old concept of the importance of acknowledging the moments when Black people can celebrate, even while facing and fighting oppression. In the poem, Brooks’s speaker, a young Black girl named Cynthia, explores the happy surprise of catching snow falling before it merges with the mud of the road and turns into a mucky mess. Brooks creates a world where a young Black girl marvels at the beauty of the snow around her, imbuing it with quasi-magical powers as she imagines it laughing, and unselfconsciously making up sing-song rhymes about its seemingly willful movements as she calls its “twitter-flitters.”
Even though there is darkness at the edges of Cynthia’s experience: the snow is possibly laughing at her, or at least in a way that excludes her, and its whiteness adds an element of oppression and unreachable purity to Cynthia’s already race-conscious internal world, Brooks intentionally focuses on awe and wonder. The poem is intended for children, to create joy in them and to mirror their own experiences.
Magic and the Natural World
There is a touch of magic in the world of “Cynthia in the Snow.” The snow is personified in a variety of ways, having the ability to quiet the world around it as “It SUSHES / It hushes” (Lines 1-2), moving in a way that suggests consciousness as it “twitter-flitters” (Line 4) away from the young girl observing it, and even laughing as it falls with “a lovely whiteness” (Line 6). Cynthia projects onto the snow attributes of the sublime—she is aware that she is catching the snow in the perfect moment, while it is “still” completely white and unsullied (Line 10), but she also suspects that this kind of snow is actually intended for the fairytale location of “otherwhere” (Line 9). Brooks understands that engaging in imaginative play with one’s world is a quintessential element of childhood. These elements of a fairytale magic are an appreciation of the natural world.
Complex Emotions
Cynthia experiences a complex set of emotions about the snow. Along with the joy and play of experiencing the magical snowfall, Cynthia feels its whiteness as a mocking, antagonistic force. The snowflakes are near, but just out of her grasp as the snow “whitely whirls away” (Line 7). She imagines the snow laughing, but this laughter seems to exclude her or even be at her expense—Cynthia has the desire to laugh too, but the snow “laughs away from me” (Line 5). Finally, Cynthia acknowledges that the experience of the snow is tinged with bitterness and longing as she describes the vision of dancing snow as “so beautiful it hurts” (Line 11). The poem ends on this expression of aesthetically induced pain—an emotion that connects Brooks’s poem to the Romantic notion of the sublime, or being struck by mixed emotions in the face of an overwhelming natural force. The irony here, is that the force overwhelming Cynthia’s emotions is whiteness—racial discrimination created by people.
The poem’s deep undercurrent offers a look into Cynthia’s inner world. Growing up as a young Black girl in a Black neighborhood in early-to-mid 20th century Chicago, Cynthia grapples with race, insecurity, desire, and the complex feelings that come with these topics.
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By Gwendolyn Brooks
