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The Snow Man
Poem of the Week
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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.
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Wallace Stevens
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One of the great modernist poets, Wallace Stevens spent his entire working life as an insurance executive in Hartford, Connecticut. As much a competitor as a colleague to his renowned contemporaries Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams, rumor has it that he once broke his hand on Ernest Hemingway’s jaw in a fight down in Key West.
Some of his best known poems include Sunday Morning, The Idea of Order in Key West, The Emperor of Ice Cream, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, and Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself, but my favorite remains Snowman.
This seemingly simple poem in five, three line stanzas can leave a reader shaking his head after the last stanza;
“nothing himself”, “nothing that is not there”, “the nothing that is”?
But the poem encompasses an entire, accurate philosophy.
Although the poem consists of five stanzas, it also consists of only one sentence. Written in prose it would read thus:
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.
Anyone who is familiar with existential thought or Buddhist concepts will grasp what Stevens conveys in his poem; but you don’t need to know any of that—simply by reading and contemplating the words of the poem you will inevitably arrive at the same conclusion.
Posted at January 20, 2006 05:50 PM