“Mother in New-Fallen Snow”

Lesley Finn created “Mother in New-Fallen Snow” from “The Snow-Image: A Childish Miracle” in The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1852). Please click here to read.

About the poem and the process of composing it, Lesley Finn writes:

My poem arose from a sequential erasure of the full text of “The Snow-Image: A Childish Miracle.” The composition process was intuitive and willfully subversive: I read the piece, in which all characters except the mother leave the house and go into the snow; she seemed unnecessarily trapped to me. I read through again, choosing words that had a gravitational pull, and after a few passes a story of motherhood quite different from that of Hawthorne’s narrative took shape. From the start of the title through the last line I kept the words in the order they appear in the original text, only altering the punctuation and capitalization.