The Mind is a Cold Place

Stevens’ exploration of the imagination, in his essay “Imagination as Value,” and its function and importance is an obvious theme that comes across in much of his poetry. Stevens, a poet of ideas, often deals with just that – our ideas, our thoughts and imagination and their relationship with reality. For Stevens, reality is the product of the imagination as it creates our world. As he says, “the truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them."

With this in mind, it is difficult to read Stevens’ poetry without understanding it as a metaphor for the imagination and mind. Even in his poems which seem to be talking about a specific subject other than the imagination, it is often obvious that the objects or topics are alluding to the ideas of imagination, mind, and reality. Such as in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” and “The Emperor of Ice Cream.” This post will be focusing on “The Snow Man” and its relationship to the imagination, mind, and reality.

Stevens begins the poem by setting up a winter scene with “frost and the boughs” and “pine-trees crusted with snow.” The first line reads, “One must have a mind of winter,” and can be interpreted in different ways. When I hear the word winter, I envision freshness and a sea of white; a mind of winter, therefore indicating a mind that is white like a blank slate. One must remove his previous thoughts and notions, and start fresh and anew.

But what must one have a fresh outlook for? Stevens continues, that one must have this “mind of winter” in order to regard the harsh and cold attributes of winter (which he depicts in detail) and “not to think/Of any misery in the sound of the wind.” In order to remove oneself from any association with misery, one must clear his mind and have an objective, winter-like outlook. Only a snow man who has “been cold a long time,” and is used to the bitter cold can disregard it to perceive an objective view of reality.

Stevens’ interweaves this message in the poem by beginning with us, with the “one” of the poem, watching the winter scene, as our mind stirs with the cold and miserable connotations of winter. However, gradually we are stripped of that separation between “us” and the snow man, and we become one with the snow man, beginning to see the world through his eyes. We become able to perceive the cold of the winter, through his skin, without the feelings of discomfort a human faces with the cold. To perceive the winter scene objectively, we must have a mind of a snow man, and only then can we perceive the reality of it.

Having read Steven’s essay on imagination and taking into consideration his final point “that the imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos,” I also understand the poem as follows:

In order to break through the chaos in the chaotic world we live in, we must clear our minds of what we have learned or expect and use only our imagination to guide us. The world is a “cold” and “shagged with ice” kind of place, but we must remove these perceptions so we can view the world and our reality as a positive place shaped by our imagination.