Top 100 or so POEMS -- "The Snow Man" by Wallace Stevens

There are several poems by Wallace Stevens in our little anthology.  There are many poems by Wallace Stevens which are in the "Top Poetry" anthologies of others.  "The Snow Man" belongs in mine.

Poetry should not always be about form.  We really should read a poem with no interuption or outside stimuli; read it carefully.  Then, come to instant grips with the feelings that a work gives to you - what are you imagining and what are you feeling?

Then, look at the form.

This poem is a Stevens classic.  It seems to be an expression of Stevens' outward objective perspective of a winter scene to a relatively subjective emotional response (thinking of misery in the sound of the wind), to the final idea that the listener and the world itself are "nothing" apart from these perspectives.

Anyway, don't think too much.  Just enjoy the poem.  

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.