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A Close reading
"The Snow Man" is the eighth poem in Wallace Stevens' first book of poems, Harmonium (1923). As Stevens says in Transport to Summer (1947), "The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully" (Collected Poems 1982), 350. "The Snow Man" does that. An active reader must engage her intelligence if she is to make sense of this poem.

It helps going in if the reader understands that from early to late Stevens wrote about the complex relation that every person experiences between reality and the imagination. Often, for Stevens, "reality" means the individual's world, the locale, the setting, the weather, others present, etc. Stevens also called that particular stage setting for the poem "the world." These are two mundane but important meanings of "reality" and "world" for understanding Stevens' poetry. But, one complicating factor in Stevens' thinking is that in poetry, "Les Plus Belles Pages, are those in which things do not stand alone, but are operative as the result of interaction, inter-relation. This is an idea of some consequence, not a casual improvisation" OP, 294. (To understand these central ideas further, read Stevens' poem "Les Plus Belle Pages" CP, 244-45, and "A Note on 'Les Plus Belle Pages' OP 293-94.) Stevens describes the most important kind of "inter-relation" the imagination sees as "resemblance," which is the root of all metaphor. See the opening two paragraphs of "Three Academic Pieces" (1947), The Necessary Angel, Knopf, 1951, 71 for Stevens on "resemblances."

An active reader now has to apply that knowledge to "The Snow Man." The snow man is not a persona, not the speaker of the poem. The poet, that is, "one," sees more than the snow man does and speaks to us about the snow man's limitations. He is wholly of his world, completely made of his world. The poet tries to see things as the snow man does, but because he has an imagination he cannot confine himself to the snow man's utterly unimaginative perspective. The poet, "one," sees interactions, resemblances: "pine-trees crusted with snow," "junipers shagged with ice," and "spruces rough in the distant glitter." The three italicized words are metaphors, resemblances perceived by the imagination.

So the speaker has a "mind of winter," thanks to his imagination, even though he is not made out of snow. The second stanza moves to a broader reach of "inter-relation." "One"—the poet and now the active reader—hears "misery in the sound of the wind." The snow man's world is cold and bare and is filled with "the same wind" in which we and the poet can hear misery. The snow man, though, like a human being without imagination, is "nothing himself," and therefore "beholds / Nothing that is not there and nothing that is." What is "not there" is the misery that imagination tells us resembles the wind. What "is there" is the reality of the snow man's world--cold, barrenness, and the meaningless wind--all of which the snow man also fails to behold because he is so closely allied to them.

References[edit]
Category: Poetry by Wallace Stevens