Week 2- "The Snow Man", "The Tempest", and "The Marvel"

            Maybe I’ve just watched “Frosty the Snowman” too many times, but to me, Stevens’ “The Snow Man” tells about the relationship between a snow man (two words) and a snowman (one word). I noticed that there seem to be two characters- someone with “a mind of winter” and someone who’s “the listener”. I think the former is the snowman: because he has “a mind of winter” and has “been cold a long time”, the sound of the wind picking up or of trees dropping their leaves is not one of misery for him; quite the opposite, for as a snowman, he needs cold and snow to survive. Then we have “the listener”. He isn’t characterized nearly as heavily as the snowman; the only lines which I found lent to his development were that he “listens” in the snow, as if waiting for the right conditions in which to make a snowman, and that he “beholds… the nothing that is [there]”, meaning he sees the possibility for building a snowman and imagines it is already there; it just has yet to be carved out of the wintry landscape.

            Although I didn’t understand the big picture that “The Tempest” paints, I enjoyed the poem’s language and the smaller images it conveys. The subject seems to be going through a difficult time. “The urge to see through things” expresses desperation, a feeling which is later solidified by the description of the subject weeping, words like “tragic”, and the presence of a knife. The yearning for clearer vision is elaborated by “the blue square becomes a window, the box a building”- blurry, generic forms are taking the shape of actual objects, perhaps as the desperation passes and the subject regains her clarity. In the second stanza, I read “the bus takes off from the base of a column” as another example of fuzzy vision because the bus stop or station that is implied is not described as a building but as a simple pillar shape. As for the shift in voice from “she” to “you” between the first and second stanzas, I love how it allows for so much creative interpretation. “She” and “you” could be the same person, having a sort of out-of-body experience by the end of the poem, with the actions in the second stanza taking place after those in the first. Or, “she” and “you” could be the same person, but reflecting on the course her life really took (first stanza) versus what could have happened (second stanza). This second interpretation would explain why at the beginning of both stanzas, the subject is experiencing “blurred” vision. She is experiencing some kind of trouble, causing her not to see clearly, and she could either sit down by the Mississippi and cry, or get on a bus.

            I really enjoyed “The Marvel” for its imagery and the story it tells (as well as the theme, because I’m a sucker for nautical stuff). I love the gritty, tough, unforgiving feel of the poem, enhanced by words like “thirsty”, “corpse”, “gluttonous”, and “burning”. There is an obvious connection to be made with Melville’s Moby Dick, regarding the complex relationship between a man and the creature he hunts: in both texts, the creature, in its own world, is towards the top of both the literal and figurative food chain (in this poem for example, the swordfish is called “baron of the sea” and “lord”); in the human world where man sits atop the food chain, it is objectified, victimized, and preyed upon, but not without consequence or revenge.