One must have a mind of winter

 In the fall of my senior year as an English major, I enrolled in my first class with "poetry" in the title. Sure, I'd read verse in various classes, but I had a strong preference for prose, and I could have graduated without taking a specific poetry class, but for the teaching certificate I was pursuing, the school required a more well rounded curriculum, which also had me take a linguistics class I thought was well and truly niffy.

For me, poetry was a much bigger challenge than linguistics, and I was a wee daunted after the first day when Professor Mariani introduced the class by saying that modern poetry, the focus of the class, was the most obscure to understand. Added to that, he tried to further cull the field by saying he considered good work, without error, that satisfied all the requirements deserved a B, and an A was warranted only for exceptional performance. Well, I needed a poetry class, and that was the one that fit, so I stayed.

I'm glad I did. For one, I was introduced to the writing of Wallace Stevens, who had kept his day job as an insurance executive in Hartford, the urb of the suburban town where I was raised. Beyond the geographic connection, I actually enjoyed reading his work, which considering I was reading poetry is pretty exceptional. And no, it wasn't just because he had a piece entitled The Man on the Dump, although that certainly did appeal to the scavenger in me. The poem I particularly remember starts with the title of this post. Pretty good, no?

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The Snow Man

By Wallace Stevens

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.