The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens

hereafter the complete emptiness Wallace Stevens (18791955) wrote most of his poesys during the world wars period, which took the lives of millions of people. As a result, Wallace Stevens started to question the importance of religion in the modern era, and felt that you should enjoy your life in the present and not waste time active for an afterlife. In his poem The blow spell, Stevens describes a harsh winter environment creating a fantastic dramatic situation with an effective imagery. He leads the reader from a relatively objective description of a winter scene to a subjective emotional response.Roberts Packs essay on The Snow Man discusses the whim of perception, while David Perkins while foc drops on the relationship between imagination and earth through the perspective of the hoodwink military personnel. Is Wallace Steven concerned with imagination and reality, or perception? In The Snow Man, the atypical syntax and logic of the poem, as well as the usage of imagery, compels the reader to perceive the poem from an untraditional in order to both understand the role of nature and realize its very news report 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 dont see the relation with the poem. But after a few readings we discover the snow slice and the hearer are superstar individual. The disceptations One must have a mind of winter (1. 1) and And have been nipping a long time(2. 1) indicate in my opinion the listener is suddenly. Why so? winter implies iciness, and cold equals death. So if the snow while has a mind of winter, it manner he is deathlike. The snow man is indeed an image to describe this dead body, which is recovered by ice and snow.It is also a symbolisation of the cycle of life, which always ends with death. Once spring is here, the snow man will melt, it wont last forever. Just give care 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 about the poem is that it is actually exclusively one long, complex sentence, there is no rhyme, and each line has a different length. One question that whitethorn 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 instead of dividing it into five tercets?Without this specific structure the poem would lose in imagination and tone. The dramatic situation is set on a cold and peace of mind winter day, with very teentsy movement in the meets. The poem it egotism should be the akin, gentle and unhurried. This is achieved with the pulmonary tuberculosis of pauses after lines and stanzas. Because when someone dies his soul is change state from the burdens of life. The fourth line of the poem gives it this mood and tone too. It p rovides a further slowing d have with the use of one syllable formulates, and of assonance with the long o telephone cold/long, reinforcing the idea of the time passing play and death.We can divide the poem into deuce distinctive parts. The first part (from the beginning to half of the 7th line Of the January sun), correlates with the dead man losing all sorts of feelings because of the cold. The speaker describes the harshness off the environment surrounding the dead man. The rowing employed are very particular, achieving nuances which contribute to the gloriousness of the picture. For instance, the word crusted(1. 3) is use instead of covered, suggesting not only that it covers, but also the snows firmness and roughness. We can assimilate the snow to the root of a tree.It is obvious that there is an accumulation of the r practiced, as in regard, frost, pine-trees, crusted, junipers, spruces, rough, flare, and January, adding vividness to the description. One particular ima ge 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 breakup of the phrase of the January sun into the next 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 almost saying he prefers darkness. The dead man losing his mind is the main subject of the second part (from and not to think to the end). The listener considers his self a snow man, enabling him to view the world through different eyes, and thus enables him to see the vivid little details of the scene, which he would not normally 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 clea r these lines ask to appeal to the readers sense of hearing. It contains multiple 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 known 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(prenominal) aspect of this process is the movement from something particular and small to something to a greater extent 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 land.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 ultimately loses his distinctiveness by assuming the snow mans mind. And, since the mind of a snow man is lifeless, the listener would ultimately become nothing, as stated in the 14th line And, nothing himself. This idea of being nothing is, given importance by putting the phrase, nothing himself in the middle 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 message. The fricative th gives it an echoing sound. The l ine 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 Behold 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 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 little by little 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 condemning himself to disappear physically and mentally. negligee it up can be argued Wallace Stevens message is that there is no afterlife and there is no set in believing in religion.It would be interesting to study how Stevens personal and professional life determine his opinion on religion. Work Cited Wallace, Stevens. The Snow Man. The Columbia Anthology of American Poetry. Jay Parini. New York. Columbia University Press. varlet 310. Print. Pack Robert. Wallace Stevens An approach to his poetry and thought. New Brunswick Rutgers UP, 1958. Copyright 1958 by Rutgers, The State University. Perkins, David. A History of unexampled Poetry From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode (Cambridge Harvard U P, 1976), 542-544