Turns out that The Snow Man was easily my favourite poem from the bunch. I've always been drawn appreciably towards nature writings and the scenic descriptions usually given by the author. Of course, this poem delivered to me exactly what I wanted.
The amount of description was incredible. The author made it so that I could see every icicle hanging off of every bough, every sheen of glittering snow on the distant horizon. The sense of loneliness is what truly did it for me though; I felt as if the snow man was trying to forget something and might have been using the snow as an analogy for a much bigger personal issue. A mind of winter could mean a mind of frozen emotions and the struggle to get passed what might be bothering someone. Though this idea is unlikely and probably isn't best suited for this poem, I figured I'd throw out the idea. Authors so rarely mean what they say.
Marley, I think you're right on target with your thought that a mind of winter could gesture towards a frozen mind...I wonder what other evidence you could find for this idea in the poem?
ReplyDeleteI love the idea of a frozen mind as you described it. The fact that the speaker describes things such as pine trees and spruces as "shagged with ice" and "crusted with snow" shows that many objects in the poem are cold and frozen. Since everything around the speaker is frozen, you can sort of infer that he is in a frozen state of mind. The repetition of the word nothing could also show that since the speaker is having a hard time moving on, he feels a sensation of nothingness.
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree about the sense of loneliness - I wasn't initially able to put my finger on why the scene that Stevens painted felt 'off' to me. The Snow Man of the title put me in the mindset of the holiday season, the 'warm' half of winter, if you will, then the snowy landscape is punctuated by red and green and houses hang with lights. The image conjured here is harsh, desolate, like the endless gray of winter that seems to hang around, unwelcome, long after the holidays pass. Paralleling that landscape to the Snow Man's emotional state - his numbness - could imply a numbness and depression that hasn't passed as quickly as he had expected (or hoped). In that context, the closing lines of the poem could almost be the beginnings of an existential crisis, or the feeling losing of himself to the melancholy.
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