The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens

Afterlife the complete emptiness Wallace Stevens (18791955) wrote most of his metrical compositions during the hu macrocosms wars period, which took the lives of millions of people. As a result, Wallace Stevens started to question the importance of religion in the advanced(a) era, and felt that you should enjoy your life in the present and not bumble time living for an afterlife. In his verse The Snow military man, Stevens describes a harsh winter environment creating a unique melodramatic positioning through an effective imagery. He leads the reader from a relatively object description of a winter scene to a field of operationsive ablaze response.Roberts Packs essay on The Snow Man discusses the conceit of information, while David Perkins while foc employs on the relationship between imagination and globe through the perspective of the hoodwink globe. Is Wallace Steven concerned with imagination and reality, or perception? In The Snow Man, the atypical syntax and logi c of the poem, as well as the usage of imagery, compels the reader to perceive the poem from an nontraditional in order to both understand the role of nature and control its in truth theme is death. The title of the poem The Snow Man is very confusing for the reader.At first we visualize balls of snow placed on top of each other, coals for eyes, a carrot nose as Perkins implies, and fatiguet see the relation with the poem. But after a a fewer(prenominal) cultures we discover the snow man and the he arr are one individual. The personal credit verges i must have a mind of winter (1. 1) and And have been icy a long time(2. 1) indicate in my opinion the listener is slain. Why so? Winter implies nippy, and polar equals death. So if the snow man has a mind of winter, it means he is short. The snow man is and thus an image to describe this dead body, which is recovered by ice and snow.It is overly a symbol of the cycle of life, which always ends with death. Once spring is here, the snow man will melt, it wont last forever. Just like a dead body would decompose, and turn into dust. In fact, we get the sense that we are reading through the listeners mind. The first thing that is noticeable astir(predicate) the poem is that it is actually just one long, complex sentence, thither is no rhyme, and each line has a different length. adept question that may arise with is this if the poem really was meant to imitate the minds flow of thought, then why did Stevens write it in just one line alternatively of dividing it into five-spot tercets?Without this specific structure the poem would lose in mood and tone. The dramatic situation is set on a cold and quiet winter day, with very little impetus in the surroundings. The poem itself should be the corresponding, easygoing and unhurried. This is achieved with the use of pauses after lines and stanzas. Because when someone dies his soul is liberated from the burdens of life. The fourth line of the poem give s it this mood and tone too. It provides a further slowing eat with the use of one syllable words, and of assonance with the long o sound cold/long, reinforcing the idea of the time passing and death.We can divide the poem into two distinctive parts. The first part (from the beginning to half of the ordinal line Of the January cheerfulness), correlates with the dead man losing all sorts of feelings because of the cold. The speaker describes the cruelness off the environment surrounding the dead man. The words employed are very particular, achieving nuances which contribute to the vividness of the picture. For instance, the word crusted(1. 3) is used instead of covered, suggesting not only that it covers, but also the snows firmness and roughness. We can absorb the snow to the roots of a tree.It is obvious that there is an accumulation of the r sound, as in regard, frost, pine-trees, crusted, junipers, spruces, rough, glitter, and January, adding vividness to the description. O ne particular image contained in these lines is that of the distant glitter/ of the January sun (2. 3/3. 1). The use of the sound i in assonance, support the idea that the sun is so distant, it has no effect. The enjambment and the separation of the phrase of the January sun into the coterminous stanza, also relates this idea of distance. So even if the sun is visible in the sky, it doesnt play its true role provide heat.The speaker is approximately saying he prefers darkness. The dead man losing his mind is the main subject of the second part (from and not to esteem to the end). The listener considers his self a snow man, enabling him to view the world through different eyes, and and so enables him to see the vivid little details of the scene, which he would not commonly see. The dead man is leaving behind his own mind and assuming the snow mans mind, liberating him from any sufferance. This idea is supported by the word think, emphasized by the enjambment and not to think / of any misery(3. -2). Therefore, it is clear these lines aim to appeal to the readers sense of attempting. It contains nine-fold instances of the word sound, as well as the words listener and listen. In addition, there also is a prevailing use of the sound s misery, sound, leaves, same, listener, listens, and snow, which mimics the hissing sound of the wind(3. 2). On top of this, it is know that the absence of one sense contributes to the acuteness of another. In this instance, the dead man gives up his sense of sight, and tries listening instead of looking.He is able to hear the normally soft, quiet sound the wind, and the sound of a few leaves(3. 3). I think the speaker addresses the use of sound, because sound tells us a lot about our surroundings even if we dont use our vision. In our society sound enables us to communicate, and to lose this sense indirectly signifies we are as good dead. Another aspect of this process is the movement from something particular and small to s omething much vague and vast. The boughs of pine-trees, the junipers, and the spruces disappear to become the same bare place, and the sound of a few leaves becomes the sound of the put down.Along the poem, the dead man disregards his self. Slowly he loses his thought (death of the mind) and feelings (death of the body), then his senses from sight to hearing are reduced, and finally loses his curiosity by assuming the snow mans mind. And, since the mind of a snow man is lifeless, the listener would ultimately become zero point, as state in the 14th line And, nothing himself. This idea of being nothing is, given importance by putting the phrase, nothing himself in the midway of the line instead of the beginning or end, and by the repetition of the word nothing in the last two lines.The last line of the poem Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is(5. 3), the longest of it, is given more importance because it holds the key to Stevens meaning. The fricative th gives it an echoing sound. The line starts with the word behold (it means to see) due to the use of the enjambment in line 14, which emphasises the message of this particular word. By combining the words descry and nothing, Stevens is saying the dead man, aka the listener, is just sitting there dead and there is nothing, nothing to think about and nothing to do. even so if the speaker does a concession in by opposing is not there vs that is. The speaker is inducing there is nothing in the afterlife. In conclusion, The Snow Man is a poem about death, and the emptiness of the world. The dead man or the listener gradually loses his body, and then his mind to a snow man. The snow man is an image of the body in this cold environment. By assuming the mind of a snow man, he is denounce himself to disappear physically and mentally. Wrapping it up can be argued Wallace Stevens message is that there is no afterlife and there is no point in believing in religion.It would be interesting to study how S tevens personal and pro life shaped his opinion on religion. Work Cited Wallace, Stevens. The Snow Man. The Columbia Anthology of American Poetry. Jay Parini. New York. Columbia University Press. Page 310. Print. Pack Robert. Wallace Stevens An cuddle to his poetry and thought. New Brunswick Rutgers UP, 1958. Copyright 1958 by Rutgers, The State University. Perkins, David. A recital of Modern Poetry From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode (Cambridge Harvard U P, 1976), 542-544