In the Library
The Snow Man
Wallace Stevens, 1923
- Form
- Form Poem
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 5 minutes
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 0k words
£1.99
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Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
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- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Robert Frost
Frost does the same thing, but leaves a promise to keep and miles to go, where Stevens strips even that human warmth from his winter scene.
£1.99
Nature
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Emerson does the same thing, but finds ecstatic union in becoming a transparent eyeball, the same vanishing self Stevens asks of his winter listener.
£1.99
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Matsuo Bashō
Basho does the same thing, but carries his stripped, unsentimental noticing across a whole journey, where Stevens holds it inside one frozen moment.
£1.99
About the book
One must have a mind of winter. That is how it begins, and the whole poem is one sentence, fifteen lines unspooling through junipers shagged with ice and spruces rough in the distant glitter of the January sun, never once stopping for breath. Wallace Stevens sold insurance in Hartford and wrote verse of an austerity that can still frighten. Here he asks something almost impossible: to look at a frozen field and hear no misery in the wind, no grief the listener has smuggled in. Strip the self out of the seeing and what remains is not consolation but a clean, terrible clarity. The close turns on a single word repeated until it opens, the beholder reduced to nothing so that nothing itself can finally be seen. Few poems ask so much of a reader in so few syllables, and fewer still make the cold feel like a kind of mercy.