Writers are always urged to read widely in their genre. This keeps everyone up to date with the work of their peers, and with the latest trends and movements. It’s a pleasurable activity. It can also provide the readers with inspiration for their own next piece of work. Poets can find their imagination set spinning by a single word or phrase whizzing into unexpected directions, and returning with a whole new angle to furnish a fresh poem.
This is not an exercise in plagiarism; it’s simply a case of absorbing a piece by a fellow poet, allowing a phrase from it to work its magic, and advancing and enriching our own creative processes by doing so. Sometimes the magic is anonymous. We are unaware of exactly what, in a poem we’ve read, triggers the idea for the next poem we write. Sometimes we can be certain about it. Gill Hawkins of Wimborne, Dorset knows the poem and even the line that led to her piece, which is Do not be deceived by the innocence of snowmen*. This led to a new train of thought, involving getting into the head of a snowman and speaking through his voice. Gill points out that this was a fun piece to do, and says: ‘I found the images came easily as it’s a familiar subject.’ The familiarity means that imagery is transferred smoothly and naturally from writer to reader.
There can be few people in Britain who have never had the experience of making a snowman, few who have never watched the short film made from Raymond Briggs’ book The Snowman. For most of us, then, snowmen are entrenched in our lives and particularly our childhood, and reading the poem stirs memories as well as revealing the poet’s message. The subject of snowmen is not an original theme for a poem. It has been covered many times before, mostly for child readers. The Loneliness of Snowmen has attributes that make it stand out from the crowd, with its snowman narrator, its appeal to adult readers as well as children, and the final twist, with its unspoken, broad hint that snowmen have feelings too, and are not impressed by the careless suggestion that another can be built to replace the departed member of their family.
There is fine balance in the poem, with a clarity of movement from one thought to the next. We begin with the snowman’s construction, and through the first person narrative we see him as a perch for blackbirds, robins; / a borrower of hat and scarf. Next he shows himself standing proud in the night. We witness his decline in the day, and see his maker’s unconcerned response to his fate, with the resolve to build another me.