The Buck in the Snow Literary Elements

The speaker is an unidentified human observing the animals around him or her.

The poem is written in free verse, composed of a quintet, a single-line stanza, and a sestet. Most lines rhyme, sharing an "O" ending.

Millay uses simile to compare falling snow to a feather, and uses metaphor to compare the buck's blood to heat or fire with the word "scalding."

The alliterative repetition in the phrase “standing in the apple-orchard? I saw them. I saw them suddenly go” creates a hissing, fluid sound that mimics the deers' movement, while L sounds in the following phrase "Tails up, with long leaps lovely and slow" maintain that same fluidity. Alliterative F sounds in the phrase "letting fall a feather of snow" evoke the softness and silence of the falling snow.

There is a subtle situational irony in the poem's final lines: the unexpectedness of the doe's vitality contrasts with the violence of the buck's death.

Nature poetry

A snowy, pastoral landscape where human and animal habitation meet

Contemplative and philosophical

The buck and doe are protagonists, while death itself is an antagonist

The conflict is metaphorical, between living creatures—or life itself—and death.

The poem's climax comes midway through, in the single-line stanza where the buck's death is revealed.

The phrase "white sky," with its suggestion of blankness, lightly foreshadows the arrival of oblivion and death.

“Now lies he here" is an understated way to convey the suddenness, violence, and drama of the buck's death.

The presence specifically of apple trees in the orchard and a male and female deer suddenly rushing away can be read as allusions to the biblical story of the garden of Eden.

“Bringing to his knees, bringing to his antlers” metonymically depict the downfall of the buck.

The speaker directly asks the “White sky” if it witnessed the deer in the orchard, personifying it. They also describe the trees as "bowed."

The phrase "Life, looking out attentive from the eyes of the doe" somewhat hyperbolically locates the concept of life itself within the image of the doe's eyes.

N/A