During the ‘Dialogue with my Guardian Angel’ from I Crossed the Minch, the Angel accuses MacNeice of abstraction from the real world. Instead of assenting to the Angel's social realism - ‘Reading's a place where they make biscuits’ - MacNeice favours an ‘astigmatic and purblind intellectual concept of what a biscuit factory is, might have been, ought to be or can't be’ (ICM 135). As the exchange becomes more abusive, the Angel insists:

For the Angel, the snowman embodies MacNeice's dilettantism, his culpable preference for disengagement over commitment. For MacNeice, the Angel misconstrues his own metaphor, as he wants the snowman to represent an obduracy alien to its substance. When the Angel suggests that MacNeice would ‘go on standing out there as a snowman […] getting colder and colder’, he tartly rejoins ‘If it's getting colder and colder, there won't be any thaw’ (ICM 135-6). The snowman is contestable property, evoking ideas both of deep-frozen stasis and overnight change. Though the issues underlying the ‘Dialogue’ - whether the writer should embrace communism - receded after the 1930s, the analogy resurfaced over twenty years later in ‘The Snow Man’ (CP 564-5), from Solstices. Appropriately enough, the image becomes a way of understanding the individual's relationship with his past: ‘His memory was shaped by forgetting/ Into a snowman’. As before, the image is tendentious and provokes interrogation:

Snowmen are part of the comforting, chintzy paraphernalia of childhood Christmases, yet in MacNeice's hands, the image gains a disturbing timbre. If memory can be represented by a snowman, it becomes ‘a white waste’: the line suggests the occlusion of the past as well as its fundamental inarticulacy. The snowman is a ‘white dumm’, however comic he might look. Though the analogy ‘will pass’, in that it will make sense, the snowman itself ‘will pass’ because he must thaw.