Snow Man Robert Frost
The last lines of "The Snow Man," with their emphasis on seeing "nothing that is not there and the nothing that is" are particularly apt. In this poem, things not evoked are equal in importance to the things that are. Why does Stevens invoke the idea of "a man of snow," one who has been "cold for a long time" and who is capable of gazing upon a winter landscape with perfect detachment, if not to suggest that there exists an antithetical mode of perception? Although some might argue that "seeing things as they are," to paraphrase The Man With the Blue Guitar, is an absolute virtue, Stevens is (as Helen Vendler recognized) a poet who deals more often with potential than actuality. The final poem in his 1921 "lyric sequence," "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon," vividly shows an artist engaged with his surroundings, carrying his involvement to a solipsistic extreme; he brashly declares that he himself is the sole creator of his external reality. Thus, in "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon," there springs to life a figure whom "The Snow Man" creates through negative space -- made conspicuous through his absence.The poem embodies Stevens' central theme, the relation between imagination and reality. Endless permutations of this theme were possible. Was
"The Snow Man" also points to the need for creative activity. It sets itself against the modernist impulse, seen in Pound and Williams, that would restrict the mind's activity to selecting and arranging experience but not adding to it by showing that without the active contribution of the mind, the world can only be apprehended as "the nothing that is." It is a point that Stevens will return to thirty years later in his discussion of "modern reality" in "The Relations between Poetry and Painting." "She [Simone Weil] says that decreation is making pass from the created to the uncreated, but that destruction is making pass from the created to nothingness. Modern reality is a reality of decreation, in which our revelations are not the revelations of belief, but the precious portents of our own powers" (NA 174-75). In Stevens' usage, decreation has two aspects. The first, seen at perhaps its most extreme in "The Snow Man," is "making pass from the created to the uncreated." By decreating its projections on to the world, the mind beholds not "nothingness" but "the nothing that is." This reductive process leads to a recognition of our creative power, that is, our power to create what Stevens says painters such as Cezanne and Klee create, "a new reality" (NA 174). Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. To behold nothing that is not there is to behold reality stripped of all that the self attributes to it. Since misery is not part of nature but something that the self adds to it, to behold nothing that is not there suggests that it is possible not to think of any misery in the sound of the wind. Stevens' use of the word "behold" also contributes to the sense that the mind is apprehending the larger universe at the end of "The Snow Man." "Behold" suggests in addition that Stevens views this apprehension as an extraordinary moment of heightened intensity. As well as expressing a sense of possession, the word "behold" also expresses a sense of revelation, in the biblical sense of the revelation of extraordinary things. We "behold" acts of God, miracles, mysteries. "Behold," God said after creating the world, "I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree" (Gen. 1:29). As "The Snow Man " moves toward its reductive extreme, the perspective widens and the tone of the poem becomes elevated and more serious. At the poem's conclusion, "the nothing that is," pure being, is beheld, magisterially "revealed" and "possessed." . . . The reduction of all concepts from nature in "The Snow Man" turns the mind's attention from the world created by the self to the larger universe. This redirection of the mind's gaze is expressed in part through the subtle change in perspective from the particular and located to the unspecified and vast that occurs in the poem. Stevens begins this shift in perspective with the change from the very close detail of the "pine-trees crusted with snow" (CP 9; emphasis added) to the particular but more remote "spruces rough in the distant glitter" (CP 10; emphasis added). In lines 7-12, Stevens drops spatial metaphors altogether, and he shifts from the distant glitter of the spruces to the unlocated though particularized "sound of a few leaves" (CP 10). The particularity of the "few leaves" is dropped for the less specified "sound of the land," which in turn gives way to a "bare place" (CP 10). And even this bare place threatens to evaporate in the repeated "nothing"s of the final two lines.
Some common words found in the essay are:
Steven's Snow, Palaz Hoon, Mandukya Upanishad, Brahman Self, Simone Weil, Behold God, , Cezanne Klee, St Bernard, Snow Behold, mind winter, sound wind, misery sound, misery sound wind, , mind winter mind, cp 10, wind sound, winter mind, sound land, winter samadhi, beyond senses intellect, mind winter samadhi, sound wind sound, senses intellect,
Approximate Word count = 2416
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page double spaced)
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