Yesterday, some friends and I were recalling our favorite passages on snow (in honor of a serious blizzard now hitting the western side of Michigan)… Joyce, Frost, Boruch. My contribution is here, Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Snow Man,” which carries with it the quiet of tonight, with the snow turning the sky almost mauve, and the newsman telling us not to drive anywhere.
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.
