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

I just finished my late afternoon constitutional, and it was snowing hard enough that, although it's not January, and I don't think that it's Winter yet, I thought about one of the greatest poems ever written:


Wallace Stevens
(1879-1955)

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.


-- from Harmonium , 1923