Frozen Minds

In Wallace Steven's poem "The Snow Man," the narrator writes of what may truly be a snow man and how he views beauty of winter and quiet aloneness.

The first stanza says that one must have a mind literally of winter in order to watch the frost and the snow-covered boughs of the pine trees. The second tells that a person must be in the cold for an extended time in order to see the junipers crusted in ice and the spruces blinking in a haze of the precipitation stuck to them.

The speaker doesn't seem to mind being alone either as he speaks of January sun passing and that he finds no misery in a few dead leaves floating by. He apparently likes solitude. In the fourth stanza, he tells of the wind and says it is the sound of the land, or the sound of everything. And it blows everywhere in that "bare" place. Again reinforcing that he doesn't mind the thought of being alone.

The last stanza describes the person in the snow that listens. It says he is made of nothing which may be referring to the fact that he is not truly human. He may be nothing and observing alone, but that doesn't mean that just because someone cannot see the beauty of the landscape does it doesn't exist.