Paying Attention To The Sky

One must have a mind of winter...

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.

Stevens utilizes several shifts in point of view. Stanza one is “One must have a mind of winter,” referring to the snowman or the speaker regarding himself as a mind in/of nature. The line, “And have been cold a long time” (line 4), mirrors that first line in that both are suggesting that one must become numb to grasp the mind of nature in order to see the landscape as it is from nature’s point of view. 

“Everything in nature has its life and history determined by its timeless pattern, plan or essence; with the human it is the reverse.  Roses can no more be un-rosy than a triangle scan be non-triangular; but humans [God bless us] can be inhuman. Man’s essence does not determine his existence but his existence determines his essence. We determine our nature, our character, our personality, by the free choices in our existence, our life, our career in time, our history.”
Peter Kreeft

So for the human thinker who is introduced in the third stanza needs “not to think / Of any misery in the sound of the wind, / In the sound of a few leaves.” Stevens says that the sound of wind that humans find so miserable, is the same wind “that is blowing in the same bare place” (line 12). In this line, and the line that follows, Stevens draws a direct connection between humans and nature in that they exist on the same Earth, in the same conditions, however these conditions differ greatly due to human condition and imagination.

The last stanza introduces a marvelous scramble: Regarding himself as nothing, the mind of nature, the snowman mind of the perfect perceptual eye, the human (now identified as the listener in the snow) beholds the “nothing that is not there” and the “nothing that is.” It takes the human mind stripped all imagination and human feeling to conceive of that pregnant nothing that the holy spirit fills, to see the something that lies beyond the heart of nothing.

The poem suggests to me that nature is what it is because of human imagination: We are of this world and yet are never at home in it. The numerous shifts the point of view that mark the poem create a series of  unbreakable links between the human and the mind of nature. Perhaps one cannot exist without the other or needs to let the other exist.