Wallace Stevens – “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.

I think this poem is trying to communicate that in order for us (humans) to see the true beauty of nature during winter, we must be a part of it. The snow man, which is a part of the winter wonderland once being introduced to it, is the only “man” actually able to see the characteristics of winter: “the frost,” “the pine-trees crusted with snow,” and “the junipers shagged with ice.” Every other human takes on the role of the listener and cannot observe these occurrences because he is too concerned with the facts that winter hinders his ability to continue his daily work and that he thinks winter contains nothing.

Richard Wilbur – “Boy at the Window”

Seeing the snowman standing all alone
In dusk and cold is more than he can bear.
The small boy weeps to hear the wind prepare
A night of gnashings and enormous moan.
His tearful sight can hardly reach to where
The pale-faced figure with bitumen eyes
Returns him such a God-forsaken stare
As outcast Adam gave to paradise.

The man of snow is, nonetheless, content,
Having no wish to go inside and die.
Still, he is moved to see the youngster cry.
Though frozen water is his element,
He melts enough to drop from one soft eye
A trickle of the purest rain, a tear
For the child at the bright pane surrounded by
Such warmth, such light, such love, and so much fear.

Richard Wilbur’s “Boy at the Window” caught my eye because of the winter theme. I usually take a deep sigh of disgust at the thought of reading poetry, but this poem does not read or feel like a poem. I became involved in the world created by the poet and was not concerned so much with the rhyme scheme or poetic aspects as with the narrative-like story. I like how Wilbur manages to tell an interesting story and yet still convey deeper meaning. The snowman seems to be more human than the boy in that he is able to name death whereas the boy does not want to accept that the snowman will die someday. The snowman is also able to sympathize and almost empathize with the boy because he is able to put himself so well into the place of the boy that he even shares a tear with the boy.

William Shakespeare – “Sonnet 2″

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,
Thy youth’s proud livery so gazed on now,
Will be a totter’d weed of small worth held:
Then being asked, where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days;
To say, within thine own deep sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame, and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserv’d thy beauty’s use,
If thou couldst answer ‘This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse,’
Proving his beauty by succession thine!
This were to be new made when thou art old,
And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.

Shakespeare’s sonnet is about male procreation and succession. Shakespeare is trying to convey that as a young man grows old he loses the beauty of his youth because of the “deep trenches” in his field of beauty. He is past the prime of his “lusty” days, and because he is not beautiful anymore, it is important that he has a child to carry on his former beauty. Having this child will allow his own likeness to live on in a new body as he dies, and the transference of beauty from the father to the son hints at the idea of succession which was in place in the English kingdom at the time of the sonnet’s writing. I think Shakespeare is trying to say that the only meaningful creation to come of a man’s reproductive age is his child, and everything else is useless.

Mark Strand – “Keeping Things Whole”

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

“Keeping Things Whole” is basically about the narrator’s realization that he is matter and that he has a reason to live. Matter is anything that has mass and occupies a volume. A person, a field, and air are all matter. In this respect the narrator sees himself as just a part of space which occupies whatever space into which he has moved. On the other hand he mentions that his purpose in life is moving to fill in the incomplete spaces of the world. While this point of view may not be realistic because there is always something there beforehand besides in a vacuum (space without matter), it allows the narrator to fill in the mental and emotional “space” in other people through memory and love in addition to the physical space in their lives. Because of both of these points of views (one who occupies space as opposed to one who occupies “space”), the poem can be considered either cheerful or depressing. I construe it as more cheerful because the narrator’s purpose in life is to complete the lives of others by filling in their empty “space.”

John Keats – “When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be”

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love;–then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

“When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be” is basically about what the title suggests which is Keats’ fear of dying and what accompanies the loss of being. He fears that he will not have time to write about the wealth of knowledge he has accumulated in his brain before he passes away. He is also afraid that he will not have the time to write about everything he continues to observe every day. He does not want to lose the love, which he has grown accustomed to giving and receiving, and the fame which he has acquired. When he contemplates all the things he will lose when he “ceases to be,” he takes a step back from the world and, in a way, dies to those around him through his separation.

Billy Collins – “Neither Snow”

When all of a sudden the city air filled with snow,
the distinguishable flakes
blowing sideways,
looked like krill
fleeing the maw of an advancing whale.

At least they looked that way to me
from the taxi window,
and since I happened to be sitting
that fading Sunday afternoon
in the very center of the universe,
who was in a better position
to say what looked like what,
which thing resembled some other?

Yes, it was a run of white plankton
borne down the Avenue of the Americas
in the stream of the wind,
phosphorescent against the weighty buildings.

Which made the taxi itself,
yellow and slow-moving,
a kind of undersea creature,
I thought as I wiped the fog from the glass,

and me one of its protruding eyes,
an eye on a stem
swiveling this way and that
monitoring one side of its world,
observing tons of water
tons of people
colored signs and lights
and now a wildly blowing race of snow.

I think Billy Collins is trying to make the reader realize the similarities between the aquatic world and the world of land roaming creatures.  He first relates the two worlds by relating snowflakes, occurrences specific to land environments, to krill, which only live in aquatic landscapes.  They are common in that they are both extremely small and yet are “distinguishable.”  The “white plankton” go through the streets in the “stream of the wind.”  This word selection is quite indicative of the author’s point that the environments of the sea and the land are alike and even interchangeable in certain situations.  The taxi cab in which the narrator is riding is likened to a whale chasing its dinner, the krill, and later in the poem to an unnamed “undersea creature” which has the properties of a submarine.  The submarine is made in the land environment but designed for the sea environment and therefore represents the connection between the two habitats.

It seems that the first stanza outlines what the narrator is seeing from the point of view of a human looking into the aquatic universe.  The fourth and fifth stanzas outline what a sea creature will see if it can get close enough to the land world to look at it.  The second and third stanzas indicate a shift in point of view from the human to the sea creature.  The second stanza actually states that the narrator is at “the very center of the universe” and can look upon both worlds and “say what looked like what.”  The third stanza’s line “stream of wind” also demonstrates the shift because of the universality of both worlds and the ambiguity of the distinctions between the worlds.  This uncertainty between worlds can lead to the title because the narrator is unsure of whether the “snow” or “krill” is real or if neither is real.

Emily Dickinson – “A Bird Came Down The Walk”

A Bird came down the Walk –
He did not know I saw –
He bit an Angleworm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw,

And then he drank a Dew
From a convenient Grass –
And then hopped sidewise to the Wall
To let a Beetle pass –

He glanced with rapid eyes
That hurried all around –
They looked like frightened Beads, I thought –
He stirred his Velvet Head

Like one in danger, Cautious,
I offered him a Crumb
And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer home –

Than Oars divide the Ocean,
Too silver for a seam –
Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon
Leap, plashless as they swim.

“A Bird Came Down The Walk” is literally about the narrator watching a bird eat and then fly away.  The bird is in a happy mood when it is eating the worm and drinking the dew, and therefore the poem reflects this feeling.  Once the bird finishes eating, it realizes that it is in danger on the unfamiliar ground landscape.  When the narrator tries to reach out to the bird, the bird flies away swiftly and can escape to its own familiar habitat, the sky.  The poem returns to the lighthearted mood when the bird flies away, and the bird’s wings cutting through the sky are likened to oars slicing through the ocean and butterflies “off the Banks of Noon.”  By comparing the bird’s flying to rowing and swimming, Dickinson brings the notion of fluidity into the description of air and flying.  On another note the interaction between the beetle, the bird, and the rest of nature is presented differently than the interaction between the bird and the human.  The bird moves out of the way of the beetle and is almost unfazed by it because although it is a part of the unfamiliar ground habitat, it is more familiar and less threatening to the bird than the human, who forces the bird to fly off, is.

Hi

The Home tab of my site seemed empty so here is my first post.

Note the picture of Mammoth Mountain as my header picture.