The Snow Man
The Snow Man (1)
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs (2)
Of the pine-trees (3) crusted (4) with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold (5) the junipers (6) shagged (7) with ice,
The spruces (8) rough in the distant glitter (9)
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery (10) in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is (11) 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.
Wallace Stevens, 1921
FOOTNOTES
(1) The poem is (as many critics have cited) on Perception and Imagination as Knowledge.
(2) A large branch of a tree.
(3) A tall forest tree with leaves like needles. Pine trees are evergreen and grow in cool northern countries.
(4) Having a hard layer or covering of something.
(5) To look at or see somebody/something.
(6) A small evergreen bush which has sharp leaves and small purple fruits which are used in medicine and in
making gin (a type of strong alcoholic drink).
(7) To make rough or shaggy (long and untidy).
(8) An evergreen forest tree with leaves like needles.
(9) Bright light consisting of many little flashes.
(10) Great suffering of the mind or body; something that causes great suffering of mind or body.
(11) Refers either to “the sound of a few leaves”, or to each of “the sound of the wind” and “the sound of a
few leaves”.
ANALYSIS
“That strange flower, the sun,
Is just what you say.
Have it your way.
The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.”
Most readings of “The Snow Man” focus upon the metaphorical topography of the winter landscape that appears to govern the production of the poem’s meaning.
Some of these readings, emphasize the nihilism of the scene, and link it with Derridean notions of absence behind the rhetorical figure. Others, assert that the listener reduced to nothing “remains human,” because the sparse figuration in the poem is still figuration, rather than bareness.
This composition is outwardly made of a single sentence, with leisurely and factual observations, concluding with a stark philosophical inevitability—that “nothing” can be “beheld” and is comprised of the “nothing that is not there” as well as “the nothing that is.”
There is no explicit “I” in the poem. Even the supposed observer in the poem -a snowman - is “nothing himself.”
The first stanza is, thus, demanding that one should have a mind of winter when regarding the frost and the boughs so that one can see them clearly and as they are.
The repetitions of “behold” and “sound” are significant. One might try reading only the verbs of poems, which helps to isolate the energy or dormancy of the poem’s action. One might also try reading only nouns, in order to throw into relief whether they are mostly abstract or concrete, whether the poem is or is not noun-heavy. One’s senses are shifted inside the poetic space: the “listener” “beholds” rather than hearing, “one” has “a mind of winter” but doesn’t in fact escape from the potential “misery” of realizing the difference between cold and other weather.
The poem moves from an independent clause (before the first semicolon) to a clause which depends on the subject of the first clause (between first and second semicolons) to a final long dependent clause which undoes the independence of the earlier clauses by modifying them without achieving grammatical closure.
In terms of grammar and syntax, the poem enacts an independence—dissolving progress. In terms of “meaning,” however, the last half of the poem is more vibrant and mysterious: the first clauses are (merely) descriptive, while the final dependent clause is replete with some kind of philosophical or ontological import.
Stevens’ poem is exposed as both noun-heavy and noun-balanced. In each stanza, a fairly equal distribution balances the moorings of nouns and the airy nothing of the (temporarily invisible) words that string nouns together and help determine their interrelations: the triad “sound wind” “sound leaves” and “sound land” matches the triad of “nothing” “Nothing” “nothing.”
In the verbs, too, we have a balance: between four verbs of action and four of absolute being. “To regard,” “to behold,” “not to think,” and “listens” begin to interweave, in the fourth stanza, with four repetitions of “is,” which has (is) the last word.
The compelling rhetoric of the concluding stanzas is rooted in the present active voice that insists on the existence of a perceiver and a perceived scene. The man with the “mind of winter” does not think, but to Stevens there are two kinds of nothingness—“the nothing that is” and “nothing,” which is the absence of something. The greater lack is the latter—the absence of imagination in the man who “beholds nothing that is not there.”
The poem’s mind of winter is just the kind of mind that constantly reanalyzes and readjusts its view of reality. The writer of these lines could detect verbatim alikeness in the use of words (both noun and verb) in “The Snow Man” and Johann Sebastian Bach’s ‘Goldberg’ Variations, Number 25 (BWV 988); when three long syllables are followed by one short syllable in the first line, we have the same pattern in Bach’s notes (if the musical notes are to be taken as the ‘words’ of a ‘text’ (piece)).
The initial line continues a succession of short and long syllabbles, leading the reader to the ‘two short-one long’ syllables of the second line’s ending.
The second stanza continues the upheavals of long-short syllable/notes (in its middle line). This stanza’s ending, however, takes the pattern of two ‘long-short’ ones, resting on to the ‘two short-one long’ pattern of the third stanza’s beginning.
All these ballances in the shost-long syllable/notes finally creates what both Bach and Stevens may have meant in their pieces of art: a suspension and balance of stress/non-stress. A ‘nothingness’ that is troped with the organs of speech:
“But he came back as one comes back from the sun
To lie on ones bed in the dark, close to a face
Without eyes or mouth, that looks at one and speaks.”
Nima Tahsili