‘The Snow Man’ presents a dissolution of the categorical distinction between subject and object. Here we may detect the influence of Heidegger’s In-der-Welt-sein, although we need not restrict ourselves to a Heideggarian analysis, since Stevens appropriated philosophy for his poetry on the basis of aesthetic rather than systematic necessity. As he put it, “I like my philosophy smothered in beauty, not the other way around.” Stevens, was, moreover, too self-deprecating to consider himself a proper philosopher, declaring himself deficient in diligence and memory, a bit of flagrant self-debasement given his prodigious intellectual capacity--nevertheless, we may locate his position very close to the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger. It’s evident from 'The Snow Man' that Stevens held the qualitative content of consciousness to be itself a type of reality, and regarded as false the dichotomy between events in the mind and events in the external world. As we shall see, the titular snow man is by the poem's end both the subject and the object, both the beholder and the beheld.
To understand how Stevens accomplishes this transformation, let us examine the specific poetic choices that inform the semantic, syntactic, and phonological content of this poem. Firstly, the description of the landscape contains finely adumbrated figuration such that the disordering effects of entropy in nature evoke biophysiological analogues, a technique which is not quite anthropomorphization, but the metaphorical implications are clear enough. For instance, the description of the pine-trees as “crusted” is redolent of unshaveness, uncleanliness, bleariness, and fatigue, as well as of a temperamental crustiness, as in cantankerousness or curmudgeonliness. Nextly, the junipers are described as “shagged,” a word whose primary adjectival usage in the 1920s referred to either overgrowth or encrustation, or to hirsuteness (carrying connotations of haggardness, gauntness, and dishevelment), reflecting its derivation from the Old English sceacgede “hairy.” “Rough” has a similar original signification, stemming from the Old English ruh, meaning “rough, coarse (of cloth) hairy, shaggy; untrimmed; uncultivated,” an etymological lineage perhaps reflected in its contemporary dual resonance in referring either to primarily tactile phenomena or to an uncivilized coarseness of demeanor.
The phrase “mind of winter” is syntactically a generative construction, which given its metaphorical nature may elicit multiple meanings, but which Stevens here employs to simultaneously express both reference quality and compositionality; that is, to indicate respectively that the mind is both characterized by winter, as in the homologous expression “a man of humor” and composed of winter, as in “a ring of gold,” thereby collapsing the Cartesian duality of mind and matter.
Stevens further transfigures the snow man through a felicitous syntactical sleight of hand. “Have” in the first line is used in the present indicative to mean “possess” while in the fourth line the verb is transfigured to become the auxiliary verb to the past particle “been” in a present perfect construction. This tense shift is accompanied by a concomitant transformation of linguistic modality (the speaker’s attitudinal expression towards the propositional content of the speech act) from deontic (the modality of necessity) to epistemic (the modality of supposition), which pendulates on the conversion of the modal auxiliary verb “must.” This amorphous boundary between these two categories of irrealis moods encapsulates Stevens’ conceptualization of the transfiguring power of imagination: that it is a process by which our ideas about necessity morph into our notions about possibility in a seemingly permeable interchange of ontology and epistemology.
Stevens also creates an appositional identification of the sound of the wind with the sound of a few leaves, and then equates the unity of this appositional identification with the sound of the land (containing the wind blowing within that land) by specifying it as the referent to the following non-restrictive relative clause. We may also note that Stevens conceptually synthesizes the wind, sound, land, and mind through the phonemic echo /nd/. In effect, he equates the medium of perceptual transduction with the perception itself, again subverting the dichotomy between mind and reality. The enjambment of line seven has a similar effect, permitting the expression of both the intransitive and transitive senses of the verb “think,” a tactic which allows Stevens to emphasize the inseparability of consciousness from its phenomenological intentionality, signifying the interdependence between object and subject.
Notice how in this poem metaphor supplants metaphor: the artificial, particularly human interpretation of winter as misery yields to the metaphor of winter as purification and purgation. Even phenomenological reduction, the quest to perceive without presupposition things as they really are, zu den Sachen selbst in the words of Husserl, let’s see the very thing and nothing else in the words of Stevens, is a particularly human endeavor, mediated by the same interpretation. This is why ‘the snow man,’ who hears no misery in the sound of fallen leaves, perceives among the landscape not barren trees but rather pines, spruces, and junipers -- all evergreens -- and why, furthermore, human temporal divisions are indicated by the location of the winter in January, the calendarical new year. The evergreens and the January sun in which they are illuminated are significant in that firstly, they are symbols of rejuvenation, in particular a poïetic rejuvenation; that is, they represent the generation of a new fiction to displace the existential nihility created by Nietzsche’s gott ist tot. Secondly, the presence of such symbols signifies the projection of phenomenological content onto inhuman reality. For the author of Harmonium, there is no facet of the object that is untouched by the subject, and no aspect of the physical world unpermeated with the qualitative subjective experience of human consciousness.
