A girl is freezing in a telephone booth,

huddled in her flimsy coat,

her face stained by tears
and smeared with lipstick.

She breathes on her thin little fingers.

Fingers like ice. Glass beads in her ears.

She has to beat her way back alone

down the icy street.

First frost. A beginning of losses.

The first frost of telephone phrases.

It is the start of winter glittering on her cheek,

the first frost of having been hurt.

How does Voznesensky portray the challenges of

life?
 1.3 - Write Up- The Stanza Structures

Within First Frost, Voznesensky initially uses a quatrain for the first stanza
before switching to couplets in each stanza after. By using a longer stanza
when describing the girl as “huddled” and clearly suffering, perhaps
Voznesensky is symbolising the overwhelming nature of the girl’s misery.
When she actively chooses to confront this, breathing on her fingers or
beating her way home, the poem switches to couplets, and these shorter
stanzas perhaps show in some way that she is breaking the initial
overwhelming character of the grief. Furthermore, the shorter stanza
structures create a blunter, more direct tone (particularly given the almost
staccato-like nature of some of the sentences), and so this further works to
amplify how the girl is confronting her suffering by no longer allowing the
tears to overwhelm her.

Furthermore, Voznesensky’s poem lacks any regular rhyme, and given that
rhyme is often seen as a rather childlike, innocent and joyful feature of a
poem, the lack of it here only works to heighten how the “first frost” of pain
breaks the previously naive view of a child. This poem follows a
confrontation with suffering and as the specifics of suffering are certainly
not predictable in life, the lack of regularity here successfully captures this
sense of certainty or instability. However, there is one half rhyme - “losses”
and “phrases”. Given that half-rhyme creates an awkward tone,
Voznesensky is thus capturing the awkwarding of growing up and
juxtaposing this with the sense of uncertainty and nature of suffering.

Equally the almost complete lack of rhythm throughout, created by the

irregular line lengths, reinforces the same lack of joy. The poem has no
sing-song quality, but is instead blunt, direct and staccato. Any lilting or
melodic quality is absent and so Voznesensky again confronts the reader
with the brutal and harsh realities of growing up. However, this is one line
near the end, “It is the start of winter glittering on her cheek”, which seems
slightly more rhythmic, perhaps showing how beauty can still be found in
suffering. The poem thus could be seen as perhaps more poignant than
brutal at this point.

Finally, the poem uses end-stopping on almost every line, which almost
works to make each action of the narrator seem isolated, as if she has to
get through a checklist of coping with grief. Alongside the caesuras, it could
be seen to symbolise how fractured her previous joy has become now it
has been broken by this “first frost”. It is interesting that the poet has
chosen to use enjambment on both “tears” and “alone” - perhaps he is
saying that our sadness and our solitude will both continue, or perhaps he
is using the enjambment to rush the reader onto the next line and not have
us dwell on either. Whilst the poem is certainly bleak, I personally prefer to
interpret it as the latter.