"The Snow Man"-Wallace Stevens #283

In "The Snow Man," Wallace explains the inability of humans to see the world around them without passing judgement or thinking of human condition. Through this poem, Wallace argues the differences between reality and imagination.

The speaker of this poem is given the responsibility of explaining to the reader the difference between the way a human views a scene, versus the way in which a non-living object would view a scene. I picture the speaker overlooking a scenario in which a person walks out of their home after a snow storm, miserable due to the blanket of snow making it difficult to carry out their everyday chores. A snowman stands in his yard, unaffected by the winter scene. This poem has a slight didactic feel in that the speaker is trying to preach to his readers how much beauty exists in the world that is hidden because of humans' inability to view a situation completely selflessly.

This poem is one long sentence in five tercets, put together as verse. This run-on sentence gives the poem a feeling of being surreal, as if from the confusion of one's mind. Since one cannot truly know what the world would look like through the eyes of a nonliving being, imagination is a contributing factor to Stevens' rationale. There is also no particular meter; each foot varies: the poem becomes a combination of iambs ("the frost," "and not," "the sound," "that is"), trochees ("winter," "glitter,"), anapests ("to regard," "to behold," "of the land"), dactyls ("junipers"), and spondee ("pine-trees). The lack of a uniform meter throughout this poem mirrors the way in which a given situation will vary based on a person's current condition. For example, a child may be excited by the prospect of snow due to their playful disposition. On the other hand, an adult may be worried by the prospect of snow due to the presence of a new teenage driver in the family. In both situations, snow, and thus nature, is not being viewed without the influence of one's personal situation.

Stevens utilizes multiple shifts of point-of-view. In the first stanza, the reader becomes the "we" who has "a mind of winter," in this case a snow man. Stevens gives solely visual descriptions, purposely excluding any other senses that form a negative connotation of winter (i.e. sense of touch=cold of winter). The line, "And have been cold a long time" (line 4), mirrors the first line of the poem in that both are suggesting that one must become numb to the human effects of winter, and nature in general, in order to truly see the landscape as it is. In the third stanza the reader is transitioned from the snowman to the average human who finds "misery in the sound of the wind,/In the sound of a few leaves" (lines 8-9). The sensory detail of sound is incorporated in this stanza, which emphasizes the change from snowman to human. Sound transitions the reader into the next stanza, which makes the human the land, and thus nature itself. Stevens says that the sound of wind that humans find so miserable, is the same wind "that is blowing in the same bare place" (line 12). In this line, and the line that follows, Stevens draws a direct connection between humans and nature in that they exist on the same Earth, in the same conditions, however these conditions differ due to human condition and imagination. The "one" with whom the reader has identified himself has now become "the listener, who listens in the snow" in the last stanza. 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." The last stanza from this point of view almost poses a paradox. At the beginning of the poem, Stevens alludes to the idea that humans cannot see the land for what it truly is because it is always marred by human condition. However, in the last stanza, Stevens alludes to the idea that nature is what it is because of human imagination. This leaves a debate open for discussion. The numerous shifts in this poem create an unbreakable bond between humans and nature, and suggests that one cannot thrive or exist without the other.

Steven's word choice, or diction, add to the image of the winter landscape he is trying to portray. The words "crusted," "shagged," and "rough," give the vision of a very bare nature, and provide the sharpest, clearest image of nature, as seen through the eyes of the snowman. The reader is then exposed to phrases that allow them to hear with the acutest ear the cold images 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." Even the word "few" before leaves signals that little life exists. These descriptions relate to humans, and the common feeling that winter is a time representative of death, monotony, and loneliness. The repetition of the word "nothing" in the last stanza accentuates not only the idea of emptiness, but the idea that perhaps one can never truly grasp the world around them, for with imagination, the landscape is morphed, and without imagination, the scene does not exist.

Once I got into the analysis of this poem, I found myself having a great deal of difficulty. Some wording is complex and the overall message of this poem is a tad obscure. What I like in this poem is the way that the landscape is placed inside of the person. ("Full of the same wind/That is blowing in the same bare place" (lines 10-11)). The wind is blowing inside the watcher as well as outside so it is understood more easily why this person who is 'nothing' can behold the 'nothing that is not there and the nothing that is'. I liked the point made that humans cannot view a situation without thinking of the immediate effects it will have on them. This poem poses an interesting debate. Does human condition and imagination scar nature or create it? Personally, I think human condition scars nature. I think human condition and imagination twists any situation, which is how the saying, "There's three sides to every story: their side, your side, and the truth," came to be. Subconsciously, an individual will take any situation and view its effects differently based on their situation. I also found it interesting that typically snowman is one word, not two like in the title. This suggests that the poem is not solely about a snowman, but a man and how he views the snow.