What the Snow Man Knows

Mowing my yard in scorching Louisiana heat, I think of Wallace Stevens’ “The Snow Man.” I try to develop the mind of winter, but my imagination flags and I feel only the sweat streaming into my eyes, the discomfort of a summer reality that my Missouri past resists. Later, with an ice cold diet coke in hand, my mind turns again to Stevens and I puzzle over the extended image which I take to be a comment on imagination.

The single sentence spread over the five tercets sets up three conditions for entrance into the state that is being configured in the poem. The person wishing to enter this state “must have a mind of winter,” must “have been cold a long time,” and must not think of the “misery in the sound of the wind.” To listen in the snow is to move into an imaginative plane that escapes the self to behold the “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”

To become a snow man, a pun perhaps on no man, is to move into nothingness or the void out of which all real creation comes. It is rightly an act of self-denial. The image of the snow man haunts me with a sense both of the cost and the reward of the imaginative experience.