The Snow Man
I think about Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man” all winter, every winter. Now that it’s Candlemas I can really see the light waxing, and we are truly in the home stretch for the end of winter. Today I watched “Groundhog Day,” as I do every February 2, because it’s one of my favorite movies ever. I love that by the end of the film Phil changes his mind about winter and decides he can’t imagine any fate more wonderful than a long and lustrous winter.
I wish I could at least be phlegmatic about winter. I suppose I’m getting better about it in that I no longer take the weather personally. I’m not entirely convinced that winter must exist just to piss me off. Who knows? Maybe I’ll come to enjoy it, eventually.
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.
