Key Quotes

• The poem opens with imagery to do with winter, such as “frosty”, and suggests the premature end of a wintery day. Images of warmth, such as “blaz’d” and “the sun” are contrasted with this
• The use of verbs such as “wheel’d”,“hiss’d” and “flew”, such rapid movement, while the noun “rapture” suggests the intense enjoyment of the boys skating on the lake
• The natural world is represented in the poem, with “woodland pleasure”, and “leafless trees”, while the humans are also portrayed as animals. The skaters are all “shod with steel” like “untir’d” horses, chasing the “hunted hare”
• There is imagery to do with sounds, the pack is “bellowing”, the icy crags “tinkled like iron”, there is an “alien sound/Of melancholy”
• “in the west/The orange sky of evening died away”, which suggests the vivid image of a sunset as we return to the warm glow of the evening