The Snow Man

A Smile for A Saturday

A Juniper in Winter - photo credit: Markku Ylisirnio

For our Smile for a Saturday today, we turn to poetry, and a work inspired by our current season.

There is no shortage of wonderful poems about winter. This is a time when much of our world is engulfed in a frigid, snow-covered barrenness, with howling winds and the absence of the natural bounties that will blossom, ripen, and be harvested in the seasons to follow. Winter inspires metaphors of death, isolation, and sadness. But it also inspires an appreciation of the unique beauty it alone can evoke.

In short, we make of winter what we ourselves put on it. We see it through the eyes of our experiences, our hopes and fears. Where one of us might see white blankets of tranquility, another might see the earth in fretful hibernation. Is winter the end of life? Or the potential for new beginnings?

It is just this sort of projection that our poet today, Wallace Stevens, cautions us to avoid in his poem “The Snow Man.” (It’s not about a snowman, but a snow man with more nuanced implications.) Wallace suggests that we try to step outside of our own perspectives with which we see the world, to try to look freshly at the scene before us as free as possible from our own biases and prejudices. It is left unclear whether he feels such an exercise is entirely possible.

In researching this poem, we found many commentators evoke the term “perspectivism,” which Lexico (an online dictionary from the Oxford University Press) defines as “The theory that knowledge of a subject is inevitably partial and limited by the individual perspective from which it is viewed.”

At a time when it feels so much of the world is divided along lines of perception, we felt the poem was a timely reminder to try to interact with nature on its own terms, to see and listen to something like a winter landscape with as much clarity as we can muster. This is an approach that can be extended to all the facts and people with which we come into contact. It is a recognition that we all distort what we experience by passing it through our own perspectives. In the end, it is a call for humility. Thinking of this challenge, recognizing all of our own limitations, somehow made us smile in these troubled times. We can all try to perceive the world anew.

The Snow Man  
By Wallace 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.