Thursday, December 27, 2012
Winter, 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.
- Wallace Stevens, The Snow Man
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“The Snow Man” by Wallace Stevens can be summed up fairly quickly and easily using reflective listening. Basically, one must be like winter, relate to it, to be able to understand it fully, and not just see/feel/hear sadness and misery in the junipers shagged with ice, in the cold, in the wind. And any literary majors’ investigation into its meaning very well could have ended at that, if it weren’t for the last stanza that, in a way, knocks all of the simple notions you had about the poem out of your head. “The listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” What? Nothing isn’t a thing, typically, its an absence of thingness. Yet Wallace Stevens here seems to suggest that nothing itself can be absent from a place, just as it can actually be present. At first one may think that this is just Stevens throwing in the whole Buddhist, zen, (or what-have-you) notion of nothing is everything, everything is nothing. This isn’t too far off, though its just the beginning.
ReplyDeleteIn the first two stanzas, I was struck by two word choices that Stevens made, “regard,” and “behold,” when he is describing the scene to us. Now, he could have used words like “to look at,” “to see,” “to view.” These would have separated the speaker (and the reader) of the poem from the landscape, creating a distance between us and the land. Instead, he uses “regard,” and “behold,” which seemed to me to plunge us into the land, being amongst it, in it, within it even. It makes it more of a subjective experience than just a person observing, from the outside, (or inside themselves, or some how apart from) a scene that he sees.
Then he adds, “and to not think of any misery in the sound of the wind.” Again, this could be taken as a much simpler statement than we know (or at least I assume) Wallace Steven meant for it to be given the mysterious last stanza. One might think, oh, he means that it doesn’t have to remind people of sadness and misery, someone with a mind of winter could find comfort and happiness in it. But that is a little boring and doesn’t really seem to fit. On the other hand, what if the person didn’t find anything, any misery, pain, grief, or joy. What if someone didn’t attribute, or project, anything from inside their heads onto this winter scene at all? In the next stanza he seems to say, wind is wind, it’s the same everywhere, winter or summer, blowing on the same earth, expounding upon his previous idea.
Now, after rereading, the last stanza could be seen as an answer to this question that arose two stanzas before; what would happen if we didn’t project our thoughts and feelings and inner worlds on the “real” world. The person who does this, “the listener, who listens in the snow” (a passive activity, just absorbs what is to be heard), seems to dissolve almost into the world, into the winter, into the snow, becoming the snowman, becoming the world. His use of the word “nothing,” in the final lines, points out further that even words are just ideas we project on the world we live in, made up realities that blanket over what is really there.