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Letter from the Editors

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Each weekday in April, Poetry Daily brings its email newsletter readers a special poem, selected by a contemporary poet whose work has appeared on Poetry Daily, as part of its annual fund-raising campaign and in celebration of National Poetry Month. This year, Poetry Daily is presenting these poems and comments to its website readers.

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Jill Bialosky's Poetry Month Pick, April 29, 2009

The Snow Man
by Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)

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.
 

Jill Bialosky Comments:
There were many poems I was touched by for the first time, but one that continues to endure is "The Snow Man" by Wallace Stevens. I find it a beautiful elegy to a lost time, our childhood. Perhaps the reason it stays with me is the many different layers the poem inhabits.  Almost like the layers of snow in a field.  I admire the precision of language and the way in which the landscape builds stanza by stanza beginning with the searing first line “one must have a mind of winter.”  I admire how in the body of the poem the snow man is never mentioned or described, only in the title, and yet, we can visualize it in our own minds. By the end of the poem, the reader, in fact, is transformed into the snow man who we imagine standing among the junipers and spruces listening to "the sound of the wind," and "the sound of a few leaves," and "the sound of the land" at one with the landscape Stevens has deftly created. 

Perhaps the poem enchants me because I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio where the winters were long and snow filled, where I spent many hours playing in the snow, making snow men with my sisters.  We’d build our snow man by rolling a mound of packed snow across our front lawn until it built in circumference and girth, and then similarly formed its torso, and finally its head. It seemed nearly miraculous when we’d finished and stood back and looked at what we’d done. And yet, all the while there was something eerie and subversive in the act of creation, the way in which we’d ransacked the purity of the untouched snow-filled lawn.  Perhaps it was the isolation of winter that I felt in the air, the emptiness in the sound of the wind I feared, that made building our ice man so urgent. Was it the need to give life to what is inanimate?  In that sense, on one level, the poem can be read as an Ars Poetica—a poem about the creation of art from life. Later, when my son was small and he built his first snow man I thought of all those lonely winters with my sisters when we stayed outside for hours, and heard in my mind the cadences and echoes of  Stevens's remarkable poem. Stevens's snow man is iconic; he is all of our snow men, from all of our wintry childhoods.  The poem unites us. We are all essentially lonely and part of a larger humanity no better stated than in those last ponderous and haunting lines:

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
 

About Jill Bialosky:
Jill Bialosky's most recent poetry collection is Intruder (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008). Her previous collections include The End of Desire and Subterranean, and her poems have appeared in journals such as The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic Monthly. She is also the author of two novels, House Under Snow and The Life Room, and is an editor at W. W. Norton. She lives in New York City.

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