In January 1870, Sarah M. B. Piatt published a seemingly simple poem, “A Child’s First Sight of Snow,” in The Galaxy, an illustrated, monthly “magazine of entertaining reading”:

Oh, come and look at his blue, sweet eyes,
          As, through the window, they glance around
And see the glittering white surprise
          The Night has laid on the ground!

This beautiful Mystery you have seen,
          So new to your life and to mine so old,
Little wordless Questioner – “What does it mean?”
          Why, it means, I fear, that the world is cold.
(93)

This poem does what many poems about snow do and have always done: it recreates the wonder of its arrival by placing a child front and center. By inviting the reader to look at the child who is looking at the snow, it deflects any sullied or jaded vision of snow that an adult might have, therefore recreating for the reader the awe that snow conjures before knowledge and reason take over. The purpose of the poem’s dual vision, then, seems to be to reconnect the reader with the “mystery” of snow to which only a child has access. The adult in the poem has seen snow before and is therefore in a position to know what it “means,” whereas the boy not only cannot decipher its meaning but cannot even speak his own question about its potential meaning.