Hans Ostrom’s “Cabin in Snow” begins in cold stillness: the speaker stands outside a cabin, noticing breath and wind moving through pines like snakes shedding their skins. The repeated “and” gives the lines a slowed, almost trancelike rhythm. Very quickly, though, the poem turns inward. It becomes easy, the speaker says, to admire a picture-perfect idea of cabins in snow, and easy indoors to believe in “an Idea of Winter.” The real cabin, Ostrom suggests, is consciousness itself. Our notions of snow furnish the mind, and that fragile inner shelter holds steady against the howling of oblivion outside. The mood is quiet, reflective, and faintly eerie—winter is both beautiful and a reminder of emptiness, but the thinking self endures.
Cabin in Snow — Summary
Outside a cabin in snow, we are, and hear our, breathing here. And wind in pines shucks
itself through sound like snakes slipping through their summer skins. And it is easy out here. And out
here it is easy to admire an image-aided concept of cabins in snow. And
it is easy inside a cabin now to believe in an Idea of Winter, for notions of snow
furnish our true cabin, consciousness—which, fragile amidst oblivion’s drifts, stays sturdy against howling.