What message does the poet convey about the nature

about life and death ?

‘The Buck in the snow’ a poem by Edna Millay has a theme of death
and life is short ,she describes death by saying it’s without mercy and
unexpected . To portray this ,she uses the buck in an apple orchard
who was completely calm and all of a sudden he is death on the snow
without a motive or description just to show how life is.

Edna Millay uses a very unusual type of sentence structure ,by doing
the same ,symbolically she wants to show how strange death is. The
first stanza of the poem is very joyful where the buck and the doe are
living their life at most. It is also very peaceful setting as the poetess
uses ‘White sky over the hemlocks bowed with snow” where white
represents calmness and how life is so soothing.

From the starting of the poem ,the poetess is representing death as one
of the strongest messages , “Standing in the apple orchard” the
poetess here uses an allusion to the mythical creation to Adam and
Eve which is also co-related to death .

The tone of this poem changes along ,in the second stanza the tone
changes to stared between fear and anger .The second stanza contains
only one line ,to attract readers attention . ‘the wild blood scalding the
snow’ this line is a very significant line in the whole poem here the
poetess use such vocabulary that conveys the nature of death .

How the buck was lied down on the snow with his red blood striking the
the surface of the snow ,showing that how death is so sudden and
inevitable .



The tone shifts to a more philosophical tone , ‘How strange a thing is
death” this shows the realism and stress about the nature of life and
death .