A Mind of Winter

Wallace Stevens, the Insurance Executive and Poet. 1879-1955.

The Snowman

by Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and 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 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 was a philosophical poet who said "reality is an activity, not a static object." A law school graduate, he spent 40 years as an insurance executive, writing unbelievable prose in his spare time. He became a noted poet later in his life, winning the Pulitizer Prize in 1955, the year of his death. A man of the North, who fell in love with Key West, where he broke his hand in a brawl with Ernest Hemingway. I have a vision of Stevens in his pin-striped suit and Hemingway in rolled up kakis, wrestling on Duval.

This is one of my favorite poems. There is no connotation of cold or misery for me in its verses. I never walk in the snow without hearing it... and I never hear it without taking a walk in the snow. Then I become the snowman and behold the nothing that is and is not there. I definitely have a mind of winter. I am hoping for snow on Thursday.