140 PA RT T W O
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.Baffling as it is, this intricately linked sentence traces just about all we can
know.
“One must.. .” We go more than two stanzas into the poem before real-
izing that “must” is not insisting (“You must try snowshoeing some day”) but
inferring (“You must be dull-witted to go snowshoeing and not love it”). So,
an inert mind can sense only an inert world—is that the poem’s drift? Stevens
seems to regret such loss of feeling, yet before hearing of misery we really do
“regard the frost and the boughs” in his crisp language, we do “behold the ju-
nipers shagged” or rough with ice, the pines “crusted” with snow. Anyone in a
cold climate will “see the earth again” with Stevens, that “distant glitter / / of
the January sun.”
Now we can listen again for another possibility. “One must have a mind of
winter... To behold the junipers... and not to think / Of any misery in the
sound of the wind.” Maybe one really must, and not slobber sentiment. A Zen
Buddhist listener will be clear-minded, “nothing himself,” and yet keenly sense
“the nothing that is”: elemental wind, a few leaves, and sometimes those moon-
lit camel “mountains swimming in clouds and basking in snow” that Wallace
Stevens saw in the Rockies at twenty-two.