The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens
http://homepages.wmich.edu/~cooneys/...vens.Snowman.h
tml
Wallace Stevens
(1879-1955)
The Snow Man
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
-- from Harmonium , 1923
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http://knitandcontemplation.typepad....re_on_the.html
Commentary by Robert Pack:
(excerpts):
In the remarkable poem "The Snow Man," Stevens dramatizes the
action of a mind as it becomes one with the scene it perceives, and at
that instant, the mind having ceased to bring something of itself to
the scene, the scene then ceases to exist fully.
We, with the "one" of the poem, begin by watching the winter scene
while in our mind the connotations of misery and cold brought forth by
the scene are stirring.
But gradually, almost imperceptibly, we are divested of whatever it is
that distinguishes us from the snow man. We become the snow man,
and we see the winter world through his eyes of coal, and we know
the cold without the thoughts of human discomfort.
To perceive the winter scene truly, we must have the mind of the
snow man, until correspondence becomes identification. Then we see
with the sharpest eye the images of winter: "pine-trees crusted with
snow," "junipers shagged with ice," "spruces rough in the distant
glitter/ Of the January sun." We hear with the acutest ear the cold
sibilants evoking the sense of barrenness and monotony: "sound of
the wind," "sound of a few leaves," "sound of the land," "same wind,"
"same bare place," "For the listener, who listens in the snow."
The "one" with whom the reader has identified himself has now
become "the listener, who listens in the snow"; he has become the
snow man, and he knows winter with a mind of winter, knows it in its
strictest reality, stripped of all imagination and human feeling. But at
that point when he sees the winter scene reduced to absolute fact, as
the object not of the mind, but of the perfect perceptual eye that sees
"nothing that is not there," then the scene, devoid of its imaginative
correspondences, has become "the nothing that is."
From Wallace Stevens: An approach to his poetry and thought. New
Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1958.
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http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minst...oems/1432.html
I think, one of the themes of the poem is just the approach towards
reality, the conflict between the rational consciousness of the
existential "void", between the will to see things as they are, and the
innate human tendency to create worlds (even poetic ones), to
reinterpret what we see in artistic (or philosophical, or moral) terms.
After reading the poem one wonders who the
"snow man" is. I think it is a negative term of comparison; it is what
man cannot be, what a poet can surely never become. Much more is
suggested, if not discussed: the misery of human condition; the
natural, emotional bond between man and nature, the "emptiness
within" of the twentieth century man.
In the end there is the enigma of the interpretation of the first line.
"One must have a mind of winter" to look at the spectacle of winter
nature and not to think of human condition.
What is the meaning? Is it an invitation in philosophical and artistic
terms to look at reality without superimposing interpretations on it?
Or is it a deduction that only "snow men" can do so? That real men
create the landscape, the "reality" they see, artistically, conceptually,
morally?
The last line reminds me of the following passage from Chesterton's
Father Brown story "The Wrong Shape":
"When that Indian spoke to us," went on Brown in a conversational
undertone, "I had a sort of vision, a vision of him and all his universe.
Yet he only said the same thing three times. When first he said 'I want
nothing,' it meant only that he was impenetrable, that Asia does not
give itself away. Then he said again, 'I want nothing,' and I knew that
he meant that he was sufficient to himself, like a cosmos, that he
needed no God, neither admitted any sins. And when he said the third
time, 'I want nothing,' he said it with blazing eyes. And I knew that he
meant literally what he said; that nothing was his desire and his
home; that he was weary for nothing as for wine; that annihilation,
the mere destruction of everything or anything--"
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http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poe...ns/snowman.htm
Robert Pack
In the remarkable poem "The Snow man," Steven dramatizes the
action of a mind as it becomes one with the scene it perceives, and at
that instant, the mind having ceased to bring something of itself to
the scene, the scene then ceases to exist fully.
We, with the "one" of the poem, begin by watching the winter scene
while in our mind the connotations of misery and cold brought forth by
the scene are stirring. But gradually, almost imperceptibly, we are
divested of whatever it is that distinguishes us from the snow man.
We become the snow man, and we see the winter world through his
eyes of coal, and we know the cold without the thoughts of human
discomfort. To perceive the winter scene truly, we must have the mind
of the snow man, until correspondence becomes identification. Then
we see with the sharpest eye the images of winter: "pine-trees
crusted with snow," "junipers shagged with ice," "spruces rough in the
distant glitter/ Of the January sun." We hear with the acutest ear the
cold sibilants evoking the sense of barrenness and monotony: "sound
of the wind," "sound of a few leaves," "sound of the land," "same
wind," "same bare place," "For the listener, who listens in the snow."
The "one" with whom the reader has identified himself has now
become "the listener, who listens in the snow"; he has become the
snow man, and he knows winter with a mind of winter, knows it in its
strictest reality, stripped of all imagination and human feeling. But at
that point when he sees the winter scene reduced to absolute fact, as
the object not of the mind, but of the perfect perceptual eye that sees
"nothing that is not there," then the scene, devoid of its imaginative
correspondences, has become "the nothing that is."
From Wallace Stevens: An approach to his poetry and thought. New
Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1958.
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David Perkins
We may note that the poem posits two types of listener. One would
hear a "misery in the sound of the wind." Through his own imaginative
creativity he would project a human emotion into the scene and
locate it there. Thus, he would make the landscape one with which
human beings can feel sympathy. The other listener would hear
nothing more than the sound of the wind. He would exert none of this
spontaneous and almost inevitable creativity. The poem embodies
Stevens’ central theme, the relation between imagination and reality.
Endless permutations of this theme were possible. Was reality the
world seen without imagination? If so, was imagination the world
seen without reality? That was a bitter truth, if it was the truth. But
perhaps the snowman, who heard no "misery" in the wind, was
projecting himself into the scene just as much as the other listener.
Perhaps the snowman beheld nothing only because he was "nothing
himself," since, to cite a later poem, whoever "puts a pineapple
together" always sees it "in the tangent of himself."
from David Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry: From the 1890s to
the High Modernist Mode (Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1976), 542-544.
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