The Snow Man (Journal 22)

The Snow Man

by Wallace Stevens

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.

***

Write about “The Snow Man.”

I first met Wallace Stevens as an undergraduate.  I liked him.  He was more enigmatic and complicated than some other poets I had met; this man had depth.  I teach this poem as part of my sophomore poetry unit, and I ask my students to think critically about the poem's title and structure.  “The Snow Man” structurally is made up of five unrhymed tercets, but only one long sentence.  Each stanza seems stacked, one on the other, like a snowman, evoking the title, but also suggesting something different.  It is not, as the title may be misread to indicate, about a snowman.  The two word title is significant and should work to evoke something more sophisticated than “Frosty.” 

Whenever I read this poem, I think of Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.  One of the chapters is about the nature of winter.  While winter archetypally represents death and barrenness, Dillard sees it as a season full of life.  She focuses on the living and the vitality in the midst of the snow, rather than the frozen hibernatory quietness and death the season usually represents.  Stevens' point is similar in this poem as he contemplates the true nature of the season.  Although, his point is somewhat paradoxical.  In the final stanza, Stevens speaks of the “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”  The listener somehow has to transcend human discomfort and even the human condition (“and nothing himself”) to truly behold winter-ness.

I often ask my students to reflect about what Stevens means when he speaks of a “mind of winter.”  What does it mean to have a “mind of winter,” and how might it be different from a “mind of summer”?  Add that to the requirement of the second stanza that requires one to “have been cold a long time” in order to truly appreciate the winter-ness of the scene, the junipers and the spruces.  I ask them to notice that the “January sun” of the third stanza is juxtaposed against the coldness of the second stanza.  And I ask them to think about the significance of the final line and what it truly says about the connection between man and nature and the almost symbiotic connection between man's imagination (as opposed to the frailty of the human condition) and his ability to truly perceive nature.