The Snow Man
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.
-Wallace Stevens
I love the occurrence of conundrums in poems. They make me stop short and introduce a pause in my thought processes. Stevens's poem suggests that the listener may be a snowman, or we as listener may be cold enough to be a snowman out in the wild wind. As with any bereft landscape, especially one we may be present in, it doesn't matter what identity we are, nothingness swallows our memory for heat, sunlight, a full belly. Stevens does not wish to cause us think of Winter in morose terms, and for those of you who know my love of snow, I'm not inclined to think ill of winter. Filled with inconvenience, it is one of the things I most treasure. Being cold. Being challenged for a reason to go out. Shoveling snow. The twinkling stillness, the absolute clarity that winter brings belies nothingness. Embodies it, subsumes it, encases us in this wondrousness, nothing that is.
In many ways, this is a similar quality I look for in artwork; a conundrum that one can resolve within the experience of the physicality of the work. The thing about conundrums is that they refresh themselves. When we return to them there's a newness that we did not perceive in the last visitation with the puzzle.
