O Boneco de Neve

O Boneco de Neve
de Wallace Stevens

Deve-se ter uma mente de inverno

Para olhar a geada e os galhos

Dos pinheiros incrustados com neve;

E se ter sentido frio muito tempo

Para observar os juníperos desgrenhados com gelo,

Os espruces ásperos no lampejo distante

Do sol de Janeiro; e não pensar

De nenhum miséria no som do vento,

No som de umas poucas folhas,

Que é o som da terra

Cheia do mesmo vento

Que está soprando no mesmo lugar vazio

Para quem escuta, que escuta na neve,

E, nada ele mesmo, observa

Nada que não está lá e o nada que está.

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

North of the earthenbloom ran the land where every rose 
was not a rose was not a risen knot of wreathing prose,
where moonblood oozed holy flesh upon the frozen moor
and every quark aligned in paradox that spliced the past
to futured ossuaries in my mind. The particles of para-time
bred breathless beneath my breast an underland of heartbeats
that struck the sunset dun and strung the broken covenant
across the Arc of time. I felt the crescent's curve carve up
the State of Stalemate, felt the whiteheaded statues turn
their transfixed eyes to the umberland drumming underneath.


Essentially, this poem seeks to refute Gertrude Stein's remark, "A rose is a rose is a rose" by asserting that a rose is not a risen knot of prose that wreathes in rings around the rosie rows amid the knobby knolls where knotgrass grows.