New England Diary

View Original

'Mind of winter'

-- Photo by Petritap

"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.''

 

-- "The Snow Man,'' by Wallace Stevens

 

Mr. Stevens was a Hartford insurance executive and  famed Modernist poet.