Snow Man Robert Frost
The last lines of "The Snow Man," with their emphasis on seeing "nothing that is not there and the nothing that is" are particularly apt. In this poem, things not evoked are equal in importance to the things that are. Why does Stevens invoke the idea of "a man of snow," one who has been "cold for a long time" and who is capable of gazing upon a winter landscape with perfect detachment, if not to suggest that there exists an antithetical mode of perception? Although some might argue that "seeing things as they are," to paraphrase The Man With the Blue Guitar, is an absolute virtue, Stevens is (as Helen Vendler recognized) a poet who deals more often with potential than actuality. The final poem in his 1921 "lyric sequence," "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon," vividly shows an artist engaged with his surroundings, carrying his involvement to a solipsistic extreme; he brashly declares that he himself is the sole creator of his external reality. Thus, in "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon," there springs to life a figure whom "The Snow Man" creates through negative space -- made conspicuous through his absence.The poem embodies Stevens' central theme, the relation between imagination and reality. Endless permutations of this theme were possible. Was
It sets itself against the modernist impulse, seen in Pound and Williams, that would restrict the mind's activity to selecting and arranging experience but not adding to it by showing that without the active contribution of the mind, the world can only be apprehended as "the nothing that is. Winter, snow, ice, and cold function here not as symbols of death but as symbols of quietude, of a state of repose, reflection, and an at least temporarily lessened gap between knower and known, observer and observed. " "Behold" suggests in addition that Stevens views this apprehension as an extraordinary moment of heightened intensity. "Behold," God said after creating the world, "I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree" (Gen. He says that one must be cold a long time not to think of any misery in the sound of the wind. " With this stilled mind, "One" beholds a wintry landscape: frost and snow-crusted boughs of pine trees, "junipers shagged with ice," and "One" hears the "sound of the wind," and the "sound of a few leaves. The fourth is the superconscious state called Turiya, neither inward nor outward, beyond the senses and the intellect, in which there is none other than the Lord [nirguna brahman] . It is that sound to which "the listener . This is the formless, characterless ground of all being, all is-ness; this is precisely the is that the via negativa attempts to point toward with its formulaic is-nots: the neti, neti of the Upanishads, the nescio, nescio of St. In lines 7-12, Stevens drops spatial metaphors altogether, and he shifts from the distant glitter of the spruces to the unlocated though particularized "sound of a few leaves" (CP 10). This is also the state in which "One," as a "listener" may behold the "nothing that is," the no-thing of the via negativa, the nirguna brahman (brahman-god, or divinity, or ground of "reality," nir-without, guna-attributes), the "not-god, not-ghost, apersonal, formless" No-thing of Meister Eckhart (248).
Common topics in this essay:
Steven's Snow,
Palaz Hoon,
Mandukya Upanishad,
Brahman Self,
Simone Weil,
Behold God,
,
Cezanne Klee,
St Bernard,
Snow Behold,
mind winter,
sound wind,
misery sound,
misery sound wind,
,
mind winter mind,
cp 10,
wind sound,
winter mind,
sound land,
winter samadhi,
beyond senses intellect,
mind winter samadhi,
sound wind sound,
senses intellect,
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Acceptance Essays
