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Gazing on a bleak winter landscape of snow-covered trees, the poem's speaker asks what it would take to experience such a harsh environment and not "think / Of any misery in the sound of the wind"—in other words, to witness the scene without personifying it or reading it symbolically.
- Summary
- Structure
- Literary Devices
- Analysis of The Snow Man
- Historical Context
- About Wallace Stevens
- Similar Poetry
‘The Snow Man’ by Wallace Stevens describes the world humans visualize as “nothing” if they do not have perspectives. This poem is a description of what it takes to correctly and objectively observe a cold winter landscape, as well as the world at large, for what it is. Stevens’ narrator describes throughout the poem the characteristics of the Snow...
‘The Snow Man’ is a short five-stanza poem. Each stanza is a tercet, meaning that it contains only three lines. The lines are unrhymed, creating a free verse form. This poem works as a single sentence, from the first word to the last it reads as a single idea. This free verse poem contains several internal rhymings that maintain the flow. Apart fro...
The poem begins with a metaphor in the “mind of winter.” Here, the poet associates the essence of winter with a calm and peaceful mind. Thereafter, the poet presents an image of the pine-trees crusted with snow. It seems as if here the poet metaphorically depicting a sculpture. In the first line of the second stanza, Stevens uses metonymy by using ...
Stanza One
Stevens begins this poem, ‘The Snow Man’, by explaining a variety of characteristics that one must possess to correctly appreciate and understand the cold winter. These are the characteristics of the Snow Man who is named in the title of the poem. “One must,” Stevens writes, “have a mind of winter” to be able to regard the frost and the boughs (or the firm branches of a tree) of the pine tree. The first question raised by this poem is what does it mean to have a mind of winter? It should be t...
Stanza Two
Stevens continues into the next stanza with another characteristic of what it is to be a snowman. One must “have been cold a long time…” or simply, have had a “mind of winter” for a long time before correctly beholding “the junipers shagged with ice,” or seeing the spruces (the second type of tree named in this poem) “rough in the distant glitter.” Stevens’ use of the word “rough” has alternative meanings in the line. It means rough as in a sketchy, ill-defined silhouette in the distance, or...
Stanza Three
In the third stanza of ‘The Snow Man’, Stevens continues this image in the next line, placing the “rough” spruces “in the distant glitter” in the “January sun.” This addition of a time and environment to the poem adds a layer of intensity to the cold. These features of the landscape, pines, spruces, juniper berries, are frozen and are so stark that they remain so in the sun. The sun, along with human emotion, is unable to transform. It is at this point that the poem turns and Stevens begins t...
Stevens’ poem ‘The Snow Man’ was first published in the October 1921 issue of the journal Poetry. This poem belongs to his first book of poetry “Harmonium”. However, this poem of Stevens is often considered as a poem of epistemology and contains naturalistic skepticism. In this poem, the poet expresses his perspectivism. According to Leggett, “inst...
Wallace Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1879. As a poet, he is known for having a very wide and diverse vocabulary. Throughout his life, he worked in distinctively different jobs and studied philosophy and aesthetics. While in school as a young child Stevens studied Greek and Latin. He graduated from Harvard to become a writer has work...
Here is a list of a few poems that are similar to the themes present in Wallace Stevens’ poem ‘The Snow Man’. 1. Winter by Anne Hunter– This poem describes the power of the winter months and the control they have over the poor people. 2. Winter Landscape, with Rooks by Sylvia Plath – In this poem, Plath describes a speaker’s state of mind through t...
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Dec 14, 2016 · ‘The Snow Man’ by Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) was first published in 1921 in the magazine Poetry, and was reprinted in Stevens’s first collection Harmonium in 1923. It is one of Stevens’s most popular short poems.
Summary. The poem begins with a hypothetical "mind of winter," and a hypothetical observer looking over a snow-covered landscape. Stevens pinpoints certain details in the winter scene: boughs of pine trees, juniper trees draped with ice, and spruce trees that glitter in the winter sun.
Summary. "The Snow Man" describes a winter scene to which the reader is privy in its fullness only if they have a winter mind. The reader may get a winter mind if they read on, for the reader does, in succeeding lines, discover winter's harsh beauty.
Oct 14, 2023 · Wallace Stevens's 'The Snow Man' is a short poem that delights and puzzles, and 'resists the intelligence'. The setting is a bleak landscape of snow and evergreens; it's January, the speaker is thinking about the way ice and snow form on trees. He himself is nothing; he's the mind of winter.
The Snow Man study guide contains a biography of Wallace Stevens, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.
