"The Snow Man" by Wallace Stevens

Was a jolly happy soul

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.

—Wallace Stevens
from Harmonium (Knopf, 1923)

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Here’s a little secret from me to you: rolling about the universe with a decidedly bad¹ cancer diagnosis turns out to not be the easiest subject position from which to operate. Despite having hung around an adjacent neighbourhood during my first occurrence, I’ve never spent much time feeling like a seriously ill person, though that was another situation entirely. There was a straightforward curative treatment, entirely within reach, and I’d been fast-tracked to an excellent sarcoma centre and a brilliant surgical oncologist who took out the bad bit and left me with a pretty astoundingly functional leg. I’m sure it must have been harder than I remember, but I can’t remember ever feeling like I might be running very short on time. Time being, of course, a fiction, and so something you can’t run out of, something you can only even possess in some realm of the imagination.

So fancifully quantified, it’s been nearly two months since I had to reorient myself to a reality essentially opposite the one I’d been experiencing: that I hadn’t been so healthy, or so happy, in a very long time. Perhaps ever. I was running and taking long, aimless walks, spending some of every day outdoors. I was doing only work that I wanted to do, that fed my abject sense of vocation and personal pleasure, on the schedule that I chose and to the standard I valued. I was writing poems and baking bread and learning the names of birds, and having a lark with this newsletter after finally cluing in to the things that have always mattered most to me and discovering that those things are, chiefly, what have always mattered to me in the poems that I love. And then, it seemed, everything changed, in a way I least expected possible.

What’s to love about “The Snow Man”? I have always loved winter—perhaps a collateral effect of being a January baby, but I expect due as well to the deep mystery and magic of the small dark hours I experienced as a child: candlelit church services, and spiced cider beside bonfires, and moonlit sledding in shaggy meadows on steep river hills, and nighttime walks through woods so stilled by a snowstorm you could hear the tiny crystalline strike of a single flake against the earth. Born fifty miles from the place where I grew up, maybe Stevens had the same childhood. Or maybe it’s the fact that he was the first truly Modern poet I ever read, and so his work has shaped my psyche in some equally formative way, which makes each return to it like fitting a key inside the lock made for it to open.

This is my favourite version of Stevens’s work, his philosophical interests beautifully balanced by music-making and integrity of image. The language here is by no means complex if its employment—the single sinuous sentence threading through all fifteen lines—qualifies as virtuosic. If there is difficulty it is the requirement that one return repeatedly to the start of each phrase to situate the relationship between it and the next. But what we’re tracking is conceptually—at least initially—quite simple. “One must have a mind of winter / to regard” the frost and snowy pine, “And have been cold a long time / To behold” icy juniper and sunlit spruce, and not think the wind miserable.

These two constructions get us through eight of fifteen lines—and what follows is entirely descriptions of the sound of the wind, what it is compared to, who it is that listens to it, what it is that they behold in doing so. This is where it gets tricky, of course, the logic circling back on itself, and even before, when “the sound of the wind” is aligned with “the sound of a few leaves,” a parallel construction begging the question: what, exactly, does wind sound like? Do we really know, or do we only know the sound of its effects, the gentle applause high in an elm, the whistle against the window?

The sentence sweeps along into the fourth stanza to tell us that the sound of the wind is the sound of the land . . . which is full of the sound of the wind, which is blowing in the “same bare place”—so the wind is the land which is the wind which is the land, and here it seems that, no, we can’t tell the difference between phenomenon and effect, mover and moved, land and that which animates it—but in the turn to the final stanza, what has begun to feel circuitous to the point of absurdity finds an anchor in a singular perspective: that of “the listener,” a.k.a Frosty, around whom the landscape is organized, who organizes the land. What does the wind sound like? It sounds like wind. What does the wind sound like to a mind that seeks beyond its circumstances? Howl, whoosh, sigh, roar, whistle. What does the wind sound like to one who really listens? It doesn’t sound like anything at all.

How should I be? is the question I’ve been asking myself these last two months. If my lifespan is now counting down in years or months or maybe even weeks rather than the decades I expect we mostly luxuriate in imagining, what is it I should do with a day, an hour, a breath, a synapse? What should be my mindset, and the means by which my time—imaginary god—is made? Thus far I have tried: pious, melancholic, pragmatic, defeated, paralyzed, depressed, and, simply, numb: unfeeling, unthinking, if-I-don’t-move-nothing-else-can-go-wrong. Those of you who know me in real life can probably guess that none of these has fit particularly well.

One must have a mind of winter I thought to myself yesterday, getting dressed for a run, and as I ambled along in safe-heartrate-zone I found myself transfixed by the verbs: to regard, to behold. Stevens was an insurance executive, and legend has it that he’d send a page down the street to the library to copy out definitions and etymologies of words he was turning over in his mind whilst writing policies and other boring business things, a fact I take to mean: there is nothing accidental about any word that turns up in one of his poems. It’s not simply that one must accept one’s circumstances in order to understand them so much as that one must accept them—develop a mind for their reality—in order to see them clearly and thus to hold them in esteem, to see what is remarkable, what can be held dear, no matter the odds.

Why not bake some strawberry vanilla brioche buns with your one wild and precious life. (Windsor, January 2026.)

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1. Things remaining, somewhat, up in the air as we wait to see what effect treatment is having. As one medical oncologist told me and on to which I endeavour to hang: Anything can happen.