Impressions

The Snowman

By Wallace Stevens

There’s a silence and solitude of winter that captivates me with a lonely stillness. To appreciate the “frost and the boughs of the pine-trees crusted with snow”, and the “junipers shagged with ice”, as described in the poem, “one must have a mind of winter”. There’s this deep resonating quietness that this poem brings to the reader, and almost a sense of emptiness that one finds in beholding something that combines aesthetics and destruction with a slow pace. It is opposed by the actual characterization of winter, that it does not creep up on us but rather it hits us with a blast of sharp winds, and frozen particles of water usually exploding down on us. Then suddenly, we realize that the leaves on the trees have evaporated and all the green in the grass have been sucked out; in one moment of realization. To have regard and to behold the beauty of the aftermath in detail, there’s a need to being “cold a long time”, like Stevens states; cold a long time because then one becomes a part of the surrounding, and then one finds themselves actually listening in the snow. Listening, and waiting until you see that first snowflake falling, dancing on the skirts of the wind, and as small as it is you notice it because it sparkles loudly. And you keep watching it until it’s so close that you can see its unique pattern, and for a split second you realize you’ll never see one exactly like that one, then it sits on your nose and it melts like ice in flames, and crawls down onto your lips. It’s followed by millions more, and these snowflakes collectively take their time arriving. There’s nowhere to go, nothing to do, just time. And you notice the shimmering cotton blanketing the once green and warm place, and the trees now bearing fluffy white coolers on their arms, while holding icicles at their fingertips. Everything is united and blank at the same time, yet nothing disappears. Every little branch becomes more magnified and the ground is puffed up, and you take it all in one by one. You “behold nothing that is not there and the nothing that is”.