The Snowman by Wallace Stevens
If this poem were a garden it would be a winter garden. It begins this way:
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
What could it mean to have a mind of winter?
I’m more familiar with another poem by Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. It’s also a poem about looking. It begins in winter:
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
And it ends in winter:
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
Both poems have the quiet in them of a winter garden.
The quiet of a winter morning.
What might it mean to have a mind of winter?
Last Monday we met at Cancer Services for our writing workshop. We read three poems aloud before we started. One was E’s poem about a rose garden in winter. Sometimes a single word or image comes out of an evening and I’ll remember it. This time the word was hibernate. Winter as a time, perhaps, for hibernation. C. remembered a time when her son was small and it was raining and he was happy—relieved—because, he said, now he wouldn’t have to go outside and play. The reprieve of a rainy day. Like the reprieve of a snow day. Nothing expected. No place to go.
A mind of winter?
This past week we had a snow day here in North Carolina on Thursday. Well, a wintry mix day. White on the grass and droplets on the tree branches—droplets poised between ice and water. Nothing expected.
Last year we had a snow day in February and I took this picture. Purple tulips in winter.
Wallace Stevens calls his poem “The Snowman” but it doesn’t have a snowman in it. Except maybe for him. Oh, it just doesn’t have the kind of snowman that I was expecting.
This is how The Snowman ends:
. . . the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing
that is.
What might it mean to have a mind of winter?
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