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The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens

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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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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/mins...poems/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/po...ens/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.

Pat Righelato

This is not a grandiose claim for the infinite extent of consciousness,
but it is nevertheless a heroic effort of perception, a Modernist
reassessment of Transcendentalist vision, a revision of Emerson’s
ecstatic merging in the more sustained awareness of the separation
of consciousness and nature. Stevens is trying to make ‘a new
intelligence prevail’, an intelligence which understands the strategies
of consciousness as fictions rather than religious truths.

From Righelato, Pat, "Wallace Stevens." In American Poetry: The
Modernist Ideal. Ed. Clive Bloom and Brian Docherty. New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1995. Ó 1995 The Editorial Board Lumiere
(Cooperative Press) Ltd.

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Anthony Whiting

Stevens' use of the word "behold" also contributes to the sense that
the mind is apprehending the larger universe at the end of "The Snow
Man." "Behold" suggests in addition that Stevens views this
apprehension as an extraordinary moment of heightened intensity. As
well as expressing a sense of possession, the word "behold" also
expresses a sense of revelation, in the biblical sense of the revelation
of extraordinary things. We "behold" acts of God, miracles, mysteries.

"Behold," God said after creating the world, "I have given you every
herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every
tree" (Gen. 1:29). As "The Snow Man " moves toward its reductive
extreme, the perspective widens and the tone of the poem becomes
elevated and more serious. At the poem's conclusion, "the nothing
that is," pure being, is beheld, magisterially "revealed" and
"possessed." . . .

from The Never-Resting Mind: Wallace Stevens' Romantic Irony.

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John Gery

Prompted by the clarity of the poem's first line, once we make the
deceptively easy leap to a mind of winter we gain the power to
perform three acts: "to regard" (an act both physical and cerebral), "to
behold" (a physical act only), and "not to think" (an act most assuredly
cerebral yet one that Stevens simultaneously negates). In a mind of
winter, one can "regard" the scene before him or her, and if one has
been "cold a long time" then he or she can look at that scene without
thinking "of any misery" in its sights and sounds. Of course, not to
attribute any emotional qualities to a landscape as a viewer perceives
it is to be not a human but a "'snow man, so what the poet asks of us
is possible only within the imagination.

From Ways of Nothingness: Nuclear Annihilation and Contemporary
American Poetry. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996

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Beverly Maeder

Timothy Bahti has written that when we consider the poem as it
moves across its formal space from beginning to end/ending, the
effect of the "logic of this turn in the middle . . . is to call the scene to
the mind and, in the immediate negation, to call the mind away from
it. It is an abstraction that renders concrete." Human consciousness in
such a reading is drawn away from the sound of the wind and the
concatenation that ensues. The imagined subject's reaction is defined
only in terms of its negation: not thinking of a human emotion,
"misery." This would be what it is to have a mind of winter or, as
Macksey suggests in one of the earlier phenomenological
interpretations, to practice the "chastity of the intellect" that is the
kernel of Santayana's definition of skepticism. It keeps the
hypothetical subject of consciousness--a snow man like the
title's--safe from projecting himself onto the scene or confusing his
own emotions (if he has any) with the nature of his surroundings.

It is in part because of the fullness of the first half that we notice the
spareness of the second half and shift our attention from the
luxuriance of lexis in the first to the intricacy of syntactic repetitions
and relations in the second. If we can have a mind of winter, not
seeing this as "misery" is one of the non-ontological activities the
poem invites us to participate in. Like the jar represented in

"Anecdote of the Jar," the poem can be understood as not "giv[ing] of
bird or bush" while yet having "dominion" over all: its representational
authority over nature is ambivalent, while its patterned word-world is
clearly the sign of the power of artifice and of the artificer to create
this syntactical thing.

Many critics have considered that the principal metaphysical allusion
in "The Snow Man" is Emerson's "Nature," in particular the famous
passage in which Emerson describes himself crossing a bare
Common, and finding himself on "bare ground' where he be comes
one with nature, through the vehicle of his "transparent eyeball." "I
am nothing," he says; "I see all."

From Wallace Stevens’ Experimental Language: The Lion in the Lute.
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.

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B.J. Leggett

One of the most frequently cited of the early poems of epistemology,
"The Snow Man" (CP, 9) asks whether a world could remain over if
point of view were canceled or what the features of a perspectiveless
world might he. "The Snow Man" has been cited in support of any
number of disparate interpretations of Stevens, although it has most
frequently been given a realist reading, as an "affirmation of primal
reality" (Litz, 100) or a "'plain reality' which harbors no mystical . . .
element" (Leonard and Wharton, 65). In an influential early essay J.

Hillis Miller identified the poem's "nothing" with being and argued that
for Stevens nothingness is the underlying reality, "the source and end
of everything" (Poetry of Being, 155). In Paul Bové's more recent

Heideggerian reading the poem is said to record the process by which
its speaker "sees the primordiality of Being-in-the-World" and learns
that "he is ontologically identical with the other insofar as they are
both part of 'what-is' existing in and by virtue of 'nothing'" (Destructive
Poetics, 191). Against Miller and Bové I will argue that the "nothing" of
the poem may be read with less strain as Nietzsche's featureless
becoming, the ground upon which we construct our worlds. . . .

But of course we learn eventually that if a mind of winter were
achieved, the snowman would not in fact regard pine trees, junipers,
or spruces, since these designations are the most elementary
examples of human abstraction and classification. Neither would he
behold objects that are crusted, shagged, or glittering--all metaphors
imposed on the scene. He would not see these objects in the light of a

January sun, time and its divisions constituting another human
ordering. He would not be aware that the spruces are being observed
in the "distant glitter," since the concept of distance assumes a point
of view. In brief, the qualities of the scene that interest us, that are
described in such a way that they constitute the motive for assuming
a particular kind of mental state, are precisely what are lost when this
state is realized. The argument of the poem may thus be reduced to
this form: in order to realize x, surrender the faculties by which x is
realized.

The poem attempts to get rid of a manmade world but its language
keeps reasserting what it relinquishes and thereby reveals what a
much later text says outright: "the absence of the imagination had /
Itself to be imagined" (CP, 503). . .

Excerpted from a longer analysis in Early Stevens: The Nietzschean
Intertext.

The "sound of the wind" that is also "the sound of the land" serves as the ultimate grounding of the poem's landscape, of the poem's cosmos. It is that sound to which "the listener . . . listens," and it is that listening—as listening, a concentration beyond thought, a concentration transcending the ordinary mental noise which flashes through our heads each second—that leads to the epiphany of the poem's final line: the "Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is." This is a state of mind which various systems of Yoga refer to as samadhi. Samadhi can be variously translated as deep equanimity of mind, meditation in which the mind is quieted to the point of stillness and "one-pointedness," and apotheosis or union with divinity (sam—together with + adhi—Lord or divinity).1 It is also explained as a synthesis, a putting of the mind, or intellect, together in a unified meditative state through a contemplation of the divine (sam—together + a + dhi—mind or intellect). This state of mind, this samadhi, can be arrived at through sound; specifically, this means through the use of external sound to still the internal sounds of the mind, to still the steady stream of conscious thought (the thought that would lead to thinking of "misery in the sound of the wind"), until finally a state of quiet repose, contemplation, and sharply reduced or even eliminated sense of separation and duality is reached. This is the state in which "One," as a "listener" may behold the "Nothing that is not there," realize, in other words, the illusory nature of such separations as I and Thou, I and It, I and not-I. This is also the state in which "One," as a "listener" may behold the "nothing that is," the no-thing of the via negativa, the nirguna brahman (brahman—god, or divinity, or ground of "reality," nir—without, guna—attributes), the "not-god, not-ghost, apersonal, formless" No-thing of Meister Eckhart.

http://www.brysons.net/academic/snowman.html

http://teacherweb.ftl.pinecrest.edu...ional/paper.htm

Defining [a poem] freezes it into immobility,” Stevens reasoned to publishers three years prior to his death, expressing a view characteristic of even his first poems (qtd. in The Music of What Happens 79). Bewitched by the harmony of fiction and truth and the notes formed in the blur between their boundaries, Stevens is now a staple in the diets of many of today's post-modern poets (John Ashbery, Mark Strand, Jorie Graham) who also promote literature as a continual dialogue rather than a “statement or narrative.” Stevens's poetry enacts “a mental process”(Vendler, Music 78); he is always more concerned with the process of reading a poem than with any “answers” derived from a reading. To Stevens, immobility defines the death of both poem and reader, and to prevent such a “death” he injects a tension into his work in the form of a juxtaposition of truth and fiction. This complexity creates for the reader a perpetual balancing act between truth and fiction addressed by virtually every Stevens's critic. What is not addressed by these critics, however, is that this “harmony,” Stevens's trademark ingredient for “supreme fiction,” is a metaphor for life that in the early twentieth century beckoned a new demand on all poetry to follow.

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