Explication of Wallace Stevens Snowman - 1399 Words

Wallace Stevens explores the perception of a January winter scene in his poem â€Å"The Snow Man.† The poem occurs over the space of five unrhymed stanzas, three lines each, and is contained to a single, deceptively simple sentence. Within this sentence, semicolons split up the viewer’s actions as the speaker expands on the necessities of the scenery. Rather than that which is perceived, it is the act of perception on which the poem focuses, and passive verbs predominantly characterize this central action, imposing conditions on the viewer and the winter scene which is viewed. In this way, the poem is concerned with unification of time and distance, organizing a single instance of perception into multiple actions as the viewer’s mind and body†¦show more content†¦At the peak of winter, trees are â€Å"shagged with ice,† having sat in one place for the duration of the season. The mind of winter which regards the scene is therefore required to have sat still alongside the scenery, and so the adjectives describing the trees should be read as interchangeable with those describing the viewer. In the sense that trees with rough textures are made rougher by the frost, the onslaught of winter only reinforces what was already an aspect of nature, unifying what has been and what is. Though trees may take on an organic, shifting quality as they continue to grow, the junipers and spruces of this poem, already prickly harsh, are frozen in these perpetual states by the cold. Junipers, harsh trees meant to last through the winter, are â€Å"shagged with ice,† so that the ice only exaggerates what was already true about the texture of these trees. The same is true of the following line, in which spruces are made â€Å"rough in the distant glitter,† enforcing the preexisting nature of evergreens, as they remain the same throughout the year. The second stanza spills into the third without punctuation to create a pause. The space between the two stanzas seems to reinforce the distance of â€Å"the distant glitter // of the January sun,† which puts an end to the second sub-act of perception, as there is a semicolon after â€Å"sun.† In explicitly citing the month, the speaker has at the beginning of the third stanza finally grounded the poem in a specific