Plet: A Christmas Tale of the Wasatch — A Closer Reading

The Recurring Crash as Structural Anchor

The phrase "Crash! crash!! crash!!!" appears three times in the excerpts: at the poem's opening, again in Part First, and later in Part X. Each recurrence marks a shift in the narrator's emotional state. The first instance introduces the avalanche and the rescue effort. The second, embedded in a stanza about Jo's sister's death, links the physical disaster to personal grief. The third occurs as the narrator wakes to find the cabin half-destroyed and Jo missing. Lambourne uses the crash not merely as sound effect but as a mnemonic trigger—the narrator says the noise "bursts upon my hearing ever more"—suggesting that the trauma is inescapable. The repetition gives the poem a circular structure, returning to the same sensory shock even as the story advances.

Interior Landscapes and the Cabin as Threshold

The cabin "Our Home" functions as a psychological boundary. Inside, the narrator and Jo share confidences, wine, and memories; outside lies the "desolation, weird and white" of the avalanche's aftermath. Lambourne contrasts the cramped, lit interior—"Our lamp still burned, a red spot in the gloom"—with the vast, cold exterior. When the slide strikes, the cabin wall becomes "whitish" and the narrator feels snow on his face and hand while still in his bunk. This blurring of inside and outside mirrors the narrator's disorientation: he is "half stunned" and "too dazed to understand." The threshold is crossed when he takes his snow-shoes from the wall, Jo's hanging on the same hook, and steps into the wrecked landscape. The cabin, once a refuge, becomes a point of departure into loss.

Jo's Voice and the Weight of Unspoken Grief

Jo is introduced through his speech, which carries the poem's emotional weight. In a long monologue, he recalls his sister's death from overwork—"She was working for the sweaters then"—and his mother's face, which "fills my mem'ry like some vague, sweet hymn." These lines are the most direct expression of sorrow in the excerpts, and they stand out against the narrator's more reserved tone. Jo's question—"What should prevent my being happy now?"—is immediately undercut by his own answer: the memory of loss. The narrator notes that Jo's words were "saddest tenor" and that he felt "cold alarm" and "some premonition of impending harm." After the avalanche, Jo's absence is marked by the empty bunk and the hat on the table. His voice, once so present, is replaced by silence, and the narrator's calls go unanswered.

Movement Between Scenes: From Camp to Cabin to Snow

The poem's action moves through three distinct spaces: the camp below the slides, the cabin on the mountain, and the snowfield where the rescue occurs. The narrator descends to the "stricken camp" after the first crash, then returns to the cabin with Jo. Later, after the second slide, he climbs out onto the slope. Lambourne marks these transitions with shifts in meter and sensory detail. The camp scenes are crowded with "shrieks and voices hoarse" and lantern light; the cabin scenes are intimate, lit by a single lamp; the snowfield is "weird and white" under a "wan and pale" moon. The narrator's movement is purposeful—he "must my acts in order regulate"—but the landscape resists him. He relies on skill and knowledge of "each foot of mountain land" to reach Jo. The final image of the pair of snow-shoes on the same hook underscores the bond that the avalanche has severed.

Lambourne's poem resists easy categorization: it is at once a Christmas story, a disaster narrative, and a meditation on memory. Readers should attend to the way the verse shifts between the narrator's present voice and the events of that night, and to the recurring sounds—the crash, the silence, the calls—that structure the telling. The incomplete excerpts leave Jo's fate uncertain, but the poem's power lies in its depiction of a moment suspended between hope and loss, where the avalanche is both a physical event and a figure for the sudden, irreversible changes that memory cannot undo.

I think of that avalanche-bitten Christmas tale, its crash-echoes settling like snow, whenever I revisit The Iron Gate. Both share a miner’s patience—digging through loss for a glimmering line. Holmes’s iron gate stands firm behind memory’s shifting drifts. Quiet companionship, that. The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes — Volume 09 The Iron Gate and Other Poems — Key Ideas to Explore sits well beside such winter-worn verses.