Summary
The poem begins with a hypothetical "mind of winter," and a hypothetical observer looking over a snow-covered landscape. Stevens pinpoints certain details in the winter scene: boughs of pine trees, juniper trees draped with ice, and spruce trees that glitter in the winter sun. With the observer, we hear the wind rustling a few leaves as it blows over the otherwise barren land. The poem concludes with the observer standing in the snow, in the "same bare place" as all the components of the scene he observes. The observer, along with the scene, is subsumed into a sense of nothingness. Nothingness, it seems, is the true reality that underlies our perceptions of this world.
Analysis
The most important thing to note about "The Snow Man" is its abstraction. It is not necessarily a poem about winter, nor does the titular snowman make any real appearance. Rather, all of these natural components are at least one degree removed from reality, into imagination. For Stevens, the bare landscape of winter serves as a mental gymnasium in which he can ponder much deeper questions: how do we see the world? What exists beneath the subjective emotions and human-made designations that we impose on things? Is it even possible to strip away those subjective experiences, if they are so inherent to being human?
The poem does not fully answer these questions, nor can it, but for Stevens the act of asking the questions, and getting close to thinking about a world stripped of our personal perspectives, is mentally stimulating enough.
For such a short poem, this act of peeling back the human perspective evolves slowly and with great nuance over the course of the poem's fifteen lines. At the beginning, Stevens presents trees and snow with an almost Imagist technique, borrowing from Ezra Pound or H.D.: pure, distilled visual images, not one extra word. Though we are shown three species, they all look essentially the same, and the poem's specificity only diminishes from this point on.
The forest imagery indulges briefly a Romantic imagination, relying on human designations and perceptions of beauty. However, as Anthony Whiting writes, "this self-projection is stripped away in the next six lines, which shift from a visual to an aural mode," beginning with "the sound of the wind." The last eight lines feature an abundance of repetition: of "sound," "same," "wind," "listen," and "nothing." In meaning and in sound, Stevens reduces his poem to a blank slate, approaching a completely objective perspective. However, it is unlikely that the result of this thought experiment is achievable, or even desirable by a real person: the entire process has taken place within the hypothetical "mind of winter" of a "snow man," an observer who is so profoundly cold that he can suppress all human subjectivity.
The observer beholds "nothing" in the final stanza, because that is what remains without the human perceptions that we bring to the world. The underlying philosophy is known as perspectivism: at any given time, every one of us is viewing the world through some perspective determined by our circumstances and background. Thus the poem brings us to a type of paradox: even as we investigate the possibility of perceiving reality freed from human subjectivity, we know it is impossible.
Through poetry, Stevens achieves a sort of peace with this paradox. He avoids the temptation of treating this imagined encounter with the inhuman void as simply terrifying and meaningless. Instead, he acknowledges the fact that underneath our perceptions is "the nothing that is," the blank slate of reality up from which everything we experience is necessarily built.
