The Snow Man

Wallace Stevens does a magnificent job of showing how a snow man feels in the winter. This is a 5 stanza poem with three lines in each that has some significant word choice; the word choice is my favorite part about this poem. Such words as "bare" and "crusted" bring out what the readers pictures in their mind. It's the viewpoint of winter through the eyes of a snow man. The snow man doesn't think of the "misery in the sound of the wind" "blowing in the same bare place." It's the snow man's only environment he gets to live in and makes the best of what it can offer. The tone is very bleak and desolate, kind of like how people picture winter. The last two lines where it says, "nothing himself, beholds nothing that is not there and the nothing that is" gives the reader a sense of loneliness, despair, and hopelessness that accompanies a freezing, cold winter winter day. It makes the reader look for the future that will entail more happier, warm summer-filled days.