The Snow Man Essay Questions

What does it mean to have a "mind of winter"? Is that state of mind desirable to Stevens?

Stevens tells us in lines 7-8 that one who has a mind of winter will not be reminded of misery by the sight and sound of the season. For winter, and in general, this means the ability to suspend judgment, to withhold our automatic emotional responses to things we experience, and instead to view them objectively. Fittingly, Stevens does not express a strong feeling for or against this state of being. To an average reader, perceiving all reality as nothingness likely sounds horrific; however, Stevens treats it neutrally as a philosophical question. The desirability of a cold and wintry worldview may be moot, however, as it may be impossible to achieve, as a core requirement is severing the emotional perspectives that are inherent to us as human beings.

How does Stevens use word choice and sound to set his scene?

In the poem's first half, where Stevens is primarily invested in detailed, imagistic descriptions of winter, his descriptors are sparse but highly evocative. Words like "crusted," "shagged," and "rough in the distant glitter" encapsulate tactile as well as visual and spatial sensations, and create a setting with minimalist diction. In the last three stanzas, Stevens begins repeating words more often, and his diction turns towards the abstract and theoretical: "sound" and "same," "listen" and "nothing" are all repeated to evoke the mental landscape of an observer whose perceptions are being absorbed into a void.

Why did Stevens choose to set the poem in winter?

In many ways, winter is the ideal backdrop for Stevens' philosophical questions in "The Snow Man." For one, winter inherently creates an atmosphere of stasis and uniformity: the snow and ice that cover everything in sight predispose the mind to imagine a blank world to which we do not react. However, crucially, winter at its most frigid also has the characteristic of being considered unpleasant: therefore, it presents a worthwhile example for Stevens' challenge to the reader to withhold that automatic judgment. The season also allows Stevens' mind of winter to seem somewhat favorable, if it immunizes one to winter's discomforts, or at least renders one neutral; whereas a poem imploring a reader to give up the (equally subjective) joyous feelings of spring would come off as pessimistic.

How does the poem's grammatical form as one long sentence heighten its impact?

Stevens carefully constructs the poem's sentence to create suspension and release. The first line is a conditional, immediately begging the question: one must have a mind of winter to do what? The semicolon that ends stanza one, and the second conditional that follows, doubles that suspense, so the reader is not able to rest for any length of time in the crisp clarity of the winter images. The next semicolon in stanza three, and the clause that follows it, create a syntactic turning point in the poem that Stevens then reinforces with his shift in diction, and from visual to aural imagery. The momentum that has built throughout the poem adds immense weight to the last lines, and a counter-intuitive fullness to the "nothing" on which the poem settles.

In the last line, is there a difference between the "nothing that is not there and the nothing that is"? How could those mean different things about reality?

The ending can be interpreted a number of ways, with the simplest being that reality is nothing, and Stevens simply repeats this thought two similar ways. However, the sentence's complexity suggests a different meaning. Delving into the words, it is possible that "nothing that is not there" means that the viewer is actually seeing only what is there—seeing the landscape with a greater clarity, one paradoxically achieved by accepting reality as nothingness. The last phrase, in turn, can be read as positively affirming a nothing that is there—a nothingness that does exist as a physical entity—perhaps if "nothing" is the only word with which we can describe the physical world without our perceptions to give it character.