Shut in from all the world without,
We sat the clean-winged hearth about.

These lines are from John Greenleaf Whittier’s long autobiographical poem “Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl” (1866), written after the Civil War as a memorial to the poet’s rural New England childhood and to family members who had died. The poem describes a severe snowstorm that isolates the farmhouse, turning the outside world silent and inaccessible. In that enforced seclusion, the household gathers around the hearth for warmth, conversation, and storytelling. Whittier uses the storm’s “shut in” stillness to frame an intimate domestic scene that contrasts with the era’s upheavals and his own public life as a reformer and abolitionist.

Whittier presents the snowstorm not merely as weather but as a force that creates a temporary sanctuary. “Shut in” suggests both confinement and protection: the family is cut off from the wider world’s demands, yet drawn into a circle of shared warmth and attention. The hearth becomes a symbol of communal memory and moral steadiness—“clean-winged” evokes a bright, pure flame, almost angelic, implying that the home’s center is spiritually as well as physically sustaining. The couplet captures the poem’s larger theme: how ordinary domestic life, recollected with tenderness, can offer consolation and continuity amid loss and historical change.