Analysis of “The Snow Man” by Wallace Stevens

It is that time of year again, when soon everyone, at least where I live, will be listening to Christmas songs, as I read winter poems. I know I know, people want comfort and warmth and all I have for you is this block of ice. Well, I was never the sentimental sort. Anyway, grab a chisel so we can get at the sculpture within:

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.

This is an excellent poem, but if you are not used to Stevens, then it may be a very unusual experience (I know he appeared in my first piece with Yellow Afternoon, but I didn’t comment on the poem at all). He is the sort of artist critics hold up but most people have no time for, because of his propensity for abstraction. But, he was one of the few poets who could actually do abstraction well, and that is not something to be dismissed, merely because it is difficult. We need to be more open to different approaches in art, and not be confined to preconceptions based solely in taste. Most great art will not appeal to taste (nor the critical zeitgeist) initially, because it is, by its very nature, nonpareil — but I digress.

The title could refer to a literal snowman, or a type of human being — a snow man. The construction of the theme has already begun, which will become clear as the poem goes on.

Line 1 is interesting. What does it mean to have a “mind of winter”? And if this is referring to a snowman, then what is meant by the “mind” of an inanimate object?

Lines 2 & 3 complete the first thought, or part of it (the semi-colon could imply either), and we are now also left wondering what is meant by “regard” — how does a mind of winter regard the snow-crusted trees, in a way other minds will not or could not?

Line 4 asserts a material condition as necessary, as though this attitude or philosophy, specific to the mind of winter, must be imposed upon one by the cold itself.

Line 5 is, again, not only about what is being viewed, but how it is experienced — the junipers not merely seen, but beheld.

Lines 6 & 7 contain a brilliant enjambment, allowing for wordplay. In line 6, “glitter” is used as a metaphor for snow, but line 7 twists the meaning to refer to the glittering light of the sun. “Rough” and “distant” too are duplicitous, and thus the words themselves seem to glitter with meaning: there is at once the roughness of texture (material), as well as the roughness of far away shapes under dim light (appearance); likewise, we have physical distance, but the narrative also suggests the feeling of distance, or detachment, as a property of the snow (and therefore our subject, perhaps). Additionally, there is line 7’s “not to think”, in contrast with the earlier “to regard” and “to behold”.

Line 8 reveals that specific ability the mind of winter has: to see things as they are, without imbuing in the “sound” this feeling of misery, as another mind would be compelled to do. On that note, how does this poem make you feel after listening to White Christmas, or something similarly lacking in content, but designed to make you feel all warm and fuzzy? I don’t doubt, positively miserable for some.

Stanzas 3 & 4 use repetition (“the sound of” / “the wind” / “the same”) to create its own sound within the poem. The point is that everything is, in some way, part of the same whole, that is heard as a single sound, carried by the wind.

Line 13 could be read as if there really were misery in the wind itself, as it cries out to this being. This subverts the idea that the external world is purely material, for what if the listener were merely unable to hear what others hear? Again, this question of personifying what looks like a man, or sounds like a cry. Can the snow man be a man, if he lacks this human aspect? It is up to you to, well, regard the poem and its subject. What is he?

Lines 14 & 15 answer this question (which we’ve been wondering about since the title), as to the nature of the poem’s subject. Once more, what the subject “beholds” is brought up, but now we see that, despite all the elements that we perceived of this winter landscape — the trees, the snow, the wind, the cold — it is, in fact, “the nothing” that this being beholds, that unity illustrated in stanzas 3 & 4 (paralleled by the repetition of “nothing” here) as if even the separation of things into distinct objects were a mere imposition of our minds, more of what “is not there”. The poem ends with the nothing beholding itself.