Snow, in this poem, is not a hushed and lovely thing. It is a nuisance, and the speaker wants it gone. Rolfe Humphries gives us a medieval Welsh poet complaining about the weather, and the comedy comes from how inventive the complaint is. The title tells us the mood in advance: Dafydd ap Gwilym, a name that belongs to a real fourteenth-century Welsh poet, "resents" the winter. The verb is petty and personal, and the poem lives up to it. The snow is described with a delighted, almost childish ingenuity, yet the speaker never stops sulking.
The central idea is a tension between admiration and irritation. The poet cannot help seeing the storm as beautiful, because every few lines he finds a new image for it, but each image is also a grievance. Snowflakes are "a swarm of white bees," which is charming until you remember that bees sting. The trees bow under "a load of chalk." The stumps wear "white flour," and the whole sky becomes a "flour-loft," with angels lifting planks in heaven's floor and "shaking down dust." The domestic, workaday nature of these pictures is the joke: heaven is reduced to a mill, and the poet is the one stuck outside with flour on his coat.
That coat matters. In the fifth stanza the speaker announces that he will not leave his house "for any girl," because he refuses to look "like a miller's" or "stuck with feathers / Of eider down." The poem suddenly shows what the snow costs him: vanity and romance. A man who might otherwise be out courting is kept indoors, and the grandest weather imaginable becomes a threat to his dignity. The cheerful self-mockery here is what keeps the poem human. We believe in this speaker because he is faintly ridiculous.
The construction supports that tone. The poem is built of six short stanzas, each of six brief lines, with lines of only a few stresses. The short lines give the poem a quick, clipped, almost spoken quality, like grumbling in bursts. There is little regular rhyme; instead the sound-patterning comes from repetition and echo. "No undergrowth / Without its wool, / No field unsheeted; / No path is left / Through any field" piles up negatives, so that the snow feels total, leaving nothing out. The same insistence appears in "Blow and billow," where the doubled b sounds enact the heaving of the drifts. Humphries lets his sentences run on in cumulative lists, which mimics the way snow accumulates, flake on flake.
The imagery is the real engine, and it moves from small and tidy to huge and bleak. Early on, the snow is soft: wool, flour, fleeces, a veil. Textiles and baking give it warmth and familiarity. But the angel's cloak is "cold quicksilver," a startling, metallic, slightly poisonous image, and the drifts that "blow and billow / Across the heather / Like swollen bellies" are almost grotesque, turning the landscape into a body. By the final stanza the comfort is gone. The snow is "a wide wall, stretching / One sea to the other, / Greater and grayer / Than the sea's graveyard." The adjectives drain away the colour, and the whiteness has turned grey and funereal. Notice too that the snowfall has become something fixed and barrier-like, which is how it must feel to someone trapped indoors.
The ending is quietly effective. After all that dazzling invention, the poem closes on a plain, almost wistful question: "When will rain come?" Rain, ordinarily the thing we complain about, is now longed for as relief. It is a neat reversal, and it shows that the preceding showy metaphors were a way of passing time while waiting for the thaw.
What makes the poem worth reading is this balance of play and plainness. It treats the weather not as a grand subject but as an irritation, and in doing so it reveals how a poet's eye works: even while sulking, he cannot stop noticing, comparing and inventing.