Wallace Stevens-The Snow Man

This poem’s first line is “One must have a mind of winter” and I thought Stevens was going to explain how one can survive the cold, harsh winter instead he describes the scenes one would see in the winter. And these scenes can only be noticed and seen when one is still like a snowman or only a snowman would be able to notice these little things. Although the title already gave away that the poem would be about a snowman I thought the poem would be about a man that lived through long, cold winters since the snow and man were separated instead of being together as one word. It also becomes clearer that the poem is about a snowman when it mentions one is “not to think of any misery in the sound of the wind”. The irony is it is not that the snowman is not thinking about the misery it is the snowman is unable to think about January’s sun because the snowman is nonliving. But Steven treats the snowman as a living object it is able to see, to think, and to hear. And this is the beauty of Stevens’ poem giving a nonliving object a reality.