Wallace Stevens: Poems Lesson Plan

What do you think Stevens means by "One must have a mind of winter" in "The Snow Man?"

"The Snow Man" is all one long sentence, and the advice that "one must have a mind of winter" is the first clause--everything else in the poem is dependent on one having this "mind of winter." There probably is not any direct metaphorical interpretation for what "mind of winter" means (students might draw associations between winter and death or depression or something similar). Rather, the phrase means to invoke Stevens's perspectivism and indicate that the viewer must, somehow, become part of his or her environment to understand it. We see at the end of the poem that the person in...