Explication of Wallace Stevens' Snowman

Wallace Stevens explores the perception of a January winter scene in his poem “The Snow Man.” The poem occurs over the space of five unrhymed stanzas, three lines each, and is contained to a single, deceptively simple sentence. Within this sentence, semicolons split up the viewer’s actions as the speaker expands on the necessities of the scenery. Rather than that which is perceived, it is the act of perception on which the poem focuses, and passive verbs predominantly characterize this central action, imposing conditions on the viewer and the winter scene which is viewed. In this way, the poem is concerned with unification of time and distance, organizing a single instance of perception into multiple actions as the viewer’s mind and body are absorbed by the sight of winter.

In the first stanza, the speaker establishes a strangely reflexive description of one who views the icy scenery of midwinter. Because the first word of the poem is “One,” the notion of singularity is immediately established. In this one-sentence poem, the speaker describes a single moment of time and space, and yet this description occurs over the course of five stanzas. In choosing “One,” as opposed to “you,” “a person,” or another alternative, the speaker implants the concept of unity in the first instant of the poem, which as a whole describes only one temporal instant. The first word thus becomes metonymic, while also a location of the convergence of action and space, in that “one” is contingent. He or she “must have a mind of winter” in order to perceive the symptoms of winter, which are “the frost and the boughs / Of the pine-trees crusted with snow.” In indicating a condition to perception, the action is both abstracted and rendered exclusive. “One” i...

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... winter” of the first line of the poem, again emphasizing that the instance of perception finds itself absorbed by that which is perceived. The viewer’s body becomes the same as the scenery: “nothing himself,” he “beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” The second line of this final stanza groups the act of beholding with the identity of nothingness, reminding the reader that perception depends on the absence of thought. The “mind of winter” brings nothing external, such as misery, into the scene, beholding “nothing that is not there.” Absence is distinctively unified with presence in the idea of “nothing that is.” This final line is written with abstract language which gives us no sensory imagery. The simplicity of language echoes the simplicity of pure perception that the speaker finds so necessary to the understanding of the winter scene.