Winter Music In Words

Some of my fellow bloggers are starting to offer poems as well as music as we get closer to Christmas and deeper into winter. The essence of winter, of the attention it teaches and demands, is captured in this immortal poem by Wallace Stevens called "The Snow Man."

When I read it again for the first time in decades, it cast a light on these lines by Jack Spicer that have long haunted me from his poem, "The Birth of Venus":

Everything destroyed must be thrown away
If it were even an emotion
The seashell would be fake.

In other words, things as they are, uncolored, unclouded. "The mind of winter."

Winter is a season of essence, essences. The withdrawal it prompts is simply to an unused but familiar place which Robert Creeley describes as thus in his poem, "Thinking of Wallace Stevens":

So it is the dullness of mind one cannot live without,
this place returned to, this place that was never left.

I read "dullness" as pure passive, autonomic receptivity. The snow man, if correlative for anything, is practiced mindfulness in the stern but peaceful quietude that winter brings. I love the lines "not to think / Of any misery in the sound of wind / In the sound of a few leaves."

This poem takes us so far beyond cold and loneliness to what Stevens calls

. . . the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place,

incapable now, by transformation of our sentience, of howling in a way that re-minds us of desolation or despair. The poem reaches a pure essenced and essential place of non-brooding where we see everything ("nothing that is not there'') and through surrender "the nothing that is." Note how the mind and mood of the poem is pure Basho.

The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens

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.