Modern American Poetry

(^170) Richard Poirier
each of the poems. Thus, despite the absence of characterizing detail, the
speaker in “The Wood-Pile” shapes, from his very opening words, a human
presence for us in his sentence sounds, his voice; he makes us imagine him as
someone in a human plight “far from home.” By comparison, the “voice” in
“The Snow Man” belongs not to a person but to a quality of rumination, and
Bloom is succinctly generalizing about the poem—he calls it Stevens’ “most
crucial poem”—when he remarks of its author that “the text he produces is
condemned to offer itself for interpretation as being already an
interpretation of other interpretations, rather than as what it asserts itself to
be, an interpretation of life” (Poetry and Repression,p. 270).
“The Wood-Pile” is about being impoverished, being on the dump—
to recall two related states of consciousness in Stevens—with no clues by
which to locate yourself in space. All you can assuredly know about “here” is
that you are far from “home”:
Out walking in the frozen swamp one gray day,
I paused and said, “I will turn back from here.
No, I will go on farther—and we shall see.”
The hard snow held me, save where now and then
One foot went through. The view was all in lines
Straight up and down of tall slim trees
Too much alike to mark or name a place by
So as to say for certain I was here
Or somewhere else: I was just far from home.
If this is a situationthat resembles winter visions of Stevens, the soundresists
any effort to bring visionary possibilities into being. The voice of this man
(“So as to say for certain I was here / Or somewhere else”) cannot be
expected to test the poetic potentialities of what is seen and heard and can
even less be expected to cheer itself up by indulging in the hyperbolic or the
sublime vocabularies. There is an informality even in the initial
placements—“out walking ... one gray day”—of the spondaic effect of “gray
day,” as if it were a scheduled occurrence (like “pay day”) and of the possible
metaphoric weight in what he says, as in the allusion (but not really) to the
lack of adequate support he can expect in this landscape (“The hard snow
held me, save where now and then / One foot went through”). Such anxious
and innocuous precision about the relative hardness of the snow or the size
and contour of the trees is humanly and characterologically right. It
expresses the kind of paranoia that goes with any feeling of being lost and of
losing thereby a confident sense of self. Paranoia, displaced onto a small bird