The Midnight Skaters

... 'The Midnight Skaters' by Edmund Blunden. Blunden's 'The Midnight Skaters' begins by painting what seems at first to be a pleasant picture of an 'icy pond', a seemingly idyllic setting for a romantic poem, evoking images of happy skaters in a rural winter setting. As we read on, however, we are drawn deeper into the darker tones of the poem throughout each of the three stanzas and see that, far from being romantic, the underlying theme of the poem is a sense of impending danger. In the first stanza the sense of danger is perhaps less apparent that in the following two, yet the signs are there from as early as the second line - 'the icy pond lurks under' - where the use of the word lurks signifies a darker element to the poem than if Blunden had chosen to use, for example, the word lies in the same context. That

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