A Perspective Mind: The Snow Man, By Wallace Stevens
A Perspective Mind When viewing the world does one really stop and think, how much of this is real, and how much is just our own unique projections onto it? In the poem, The Snow Man, by Wallace Stevens, the poet informs the reader what it means to have a “mind of winter,” when gazing upon a scene in nature. The question then arises is what does it mean to have mind of winter? Stevens is not exactly asking, but instead telling the “listener,” that to behold something with a mind of winter, is to see it with absolutely no imagination, or humanistic aspect connected to it. That would then alter the scene and add more then to what it is. Imagination is what makes the world all much more then what it truly is. The speaker of the poem
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These perspectives alter reality (in this case the landscape) to something that it is not. The poem ends with the speaker ending his projection onto the world, and simply seeing the world as is. “For the listener who listens in the snow/ And, nothing himself, beholds/ Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” In theses last stanzas the “listener” has stopped projecting himself into the world. When this is done he is able to see the world as it is, nothing. If he is able to understand that nothing exists, without the projections that humans apply to it, then and only then is he able to behold “the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” He is then nothing himself. Stevens reiterates this overall theme of perspectivism in writing "The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us." The world being our imagination is something that cannot be suppressed, as our conscience will always be with humans. This being the case, the world becomes more then just landscape when viewed with the perspectivism that Stevens writes of. It takes on whatever the listener views it as. A tree can never be just a tree, or the wind just the wind. We create our own world in our own imagination. So in that sense there are billions of different world perspectives. If the mind of winter were the one true reality, then there would be the only one world
These perspectives alter reality (in this case the landscape) to something that it is not. The poem ends with the speaker ending his projection onto the world, and simply seeing the world as is. “For the listener who listens in the snow/ And, nothing himself, beholds/ Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” In theses last stanzas the “listener” has stopped projecting himself into the world. When this is done he is able to see the world as it is, nothing. If he is able to understand that nothing exists, without the projections that humans apply to it, then and only then is he able to behold “the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” He is then nothing himself. Stevens reiterates this overall theme of perspectivism in writing "The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us." The world being our imagination is something that cannot be suppressed, as our conscience will always be with humans. This being the case, the world becomes more then just landscape when viewed with the perspectivism that Stevens writes of. It takes on whatever the listener views it as. A tree can never be just a tree, or the wind just the wind. We create our own world in our own imagination. So in that sense there are billions of different world perspectives. If the mind of winter were the one true reality, then there would be the only one world