Stevens begins with a strange requirement: to see winter plainly, a person would need “a mind of winter” and would have to have been cold for a long time. The landscape is precise—frost, pine boughs crusted with snow, junipers shagged with ice, spruces glittering under the January sun. The hard part is not seeing these things but hearing the wind and a few dry leaves without adding human misery to them. That takes an almost inhuman emptiness. By the end, the listener has become “nothing himself,” able to behold “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” The mood is austere and still, even a little thrilling. Stevens is not despairing; he is describing a discipline of attention, a way of seeing the bare world as it is without our feelings laid over it.
The Snow Man — Summary
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.