Blizzard never names its subject. The title is the only place the storm appears, and the nine lines that follow show what it does to the people inside it: it pushes them together, wipes out the landscape, and then leaves one person alone with their own skeleton.
The first stanza is the warmest. "It is winter / and we speak / with passionate hands." The plain, almost casual opening gives way to a surprising image. Hands speaking could mean sign language, the gestures of people who can't hear each other over wind, or the touch of two people sheltering together. The poem doesn't choose, and that openness is part of its charm. What matters is the contrast. Winter is cold and silent, yet "passionate" is the one openly emotional word in the poem, and it is attached to the body. Warmth survives in the hands.
The second stanza lifts away from the scene: "in the world beyond / there will be no ground / that is not white." The tense changes from present to future, and the pronoun "we" disappears. "Beyond" might mean the world outside the window, the world after the storm, or something larger, such as life after death. The poem doesn't say, so each reading is available. The double negative, "no ground / that is not white," is a slow, roundabout way of saying "everything will be white," and it makes the whiteness feel total and inescapable. "Ground" also does double work. It is the earth underfoot, but it is also what we stand on in a more figurative sense, the thing that gives us our bearings. When all of it is white, nothing can be told apart.
In the last stanza the poem narrows to a single person. "I go bone by bone / through the whole / strange city." The phrase "bone by bone" is the most physical in the poem. It suggests cold reaching the skeleton, but it also describes the way someone walks through deep snow, with each step a separate effort. It could even suggest a person inventorying themselves, checking that every part is still there. The line break after "whole" is clever. The word hangs by itself for a moment, set against all those separate bones, and then the next line adds "strange city." The familiar streets have become unrecognisable, and the speaker moves through them like a stranger, or like someone in a dream.
The poem's form echoes its subject. There is no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters, so nothing marks where one thought ends and another begins, just as the snow blurs the edges of things. The lines are short, mostly two or three beats, and each stanza fits its thought into three of them, which gives a held-breath quality, as if the speaker is talking through a scarf. Sound does some of the work that rhyme usually does. A thread of w-sounds runs through the poem: "winter," "we," "with," "world," "will," "white," "whole." It is the sound of wind, and it also stitches the poem together quietly. Against these soft sounds, "bone by bone" lands with a hard, repeated b, like footsteps.
The poem's movement is its quiet argument. It begins with "we," shifts to a world with no people in it at all, and ends with "I." Each stanza loses a little more company, a little more ground. The storm becomes a way of seeing how much we depend on shared language, familiar landmarks and a sense of where we are. By the end, the only certainty left is the body, bone by bone.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. In nine unpunctuated lines it moves from intimacy to erasure to solitude, and it does so without a single explanation. It trusts small, strange images to carry the feeling, and the reader fills in the rest: who the "we" are, what lies "beyond," why the city feels strange. Like the snow it describes, the poem leaves a lot of blank space, and you notice how much you bring to it.