to have been cold a long time

losing; a mind of winter; wallace stevens

When it starts to get a little cold out, as it is right now in New York, I’m reminded of a poem that I’d memorized when I was around 21: The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens. At the time, I was terribly serious and stern with myself, and had found the poem in a dusty, large copy of the Norton Anthology of Poetry, which I had checked out from the stacks of my state university library where no one other than me and a handful of English PhDs, who all seemed happy to have found assignment, were reading books. I would get strange, alien stares from those peers who were more used to seeing me as their compatriot in helping uphold the university’s nickname, “Stoner Brook.” But I didn’t care much, not by that point, and would only tell a few close friends about what I was reading. What I believed was that studying poetry and literature was akin to studying life itself, and that there was no more important task out there in the world.

Yes, I was a little ridiculous, and a little insufferable, in that earnest and endearing way that many young people are. On early mornings, I would carry whichever book I was reading up the steps that laid out in front of the university theater. In the winter months, the steps would be matted with yellowing, untended-to grass and mostly empty. I would read aloud whatever struck me, especially if it was poetry, sounding out the rounds and sharp edges of vowels and enunciating the repetitions. It was during one of these winters, chilly and dry, when I found The Snow Man.

To me, The Snow Man was a very sad and effective poem whose emotions precipitated quickly. In the winter months, I would walk around campus and look at the trees, because the university, which was plagued with an ugliness of architecture, took a special interest in nurturing such growths, and the trees were beautiful and desperately empty, pine trees that caught wind in the little divots of snow tucked into their rough and distant branches, bare red maples criss-crossed with loose spindly twigs.

Because it was a commuter school, there would be no one on campus by evenings, and the wind and the bare branches and the terrible emptiness would create a feeling too large to name. I would decide to call this large feeling the “mind of winter” that Stevens wrote about, that what I was sensing was a grand nothingness that blew through myself and the outside world. “One must have a mind of winter” felt like an assignment. Only those with a fabled strength would be able to look at the nothingness of life directly without flinching. I wanted, like so many of us, to be strong and resilient. I wanted not to be submerged by sadness, but instead clear-headed, strong, and to be able to see a terrible and comforting nothingness in its depths.

The Snow Man would visit me for years to come, whenever fall would start to give way and the evenings would hurry in. We are, right now, in this same interim period in New York. It’s still too warm to turn the heater on but just cold enough that my apartment air has a slight bite. I have been feeling a little sad. Not for any superfluous reason, but because I am experiencing loss, a very large and loving one that was decided upon by us, two people who understand and care for each other very deeply and want the best for the other. The image in my mind has been like reaching out and freeing a fallen leaf from the crook of a branch. What is left is rough and glittered. But when I turned to The Snow Man, its usual deftness did not affect me. I read it again, and again, and then I realized that, somewhere, I had lost my love for this poem.

What could it be? I turned to biography. In an old piece, critic Peter Schjeldahl pulled out a detail from Stevens’ life that has hd me thinking. Stevens worked as a powerful insurance executive his whole life; buttoned-up, hard-to-understand, stuck in a floundering, hardened marriage that had started out head-over-heels, he was an idealist who left his very successful undergraduate literary career for financial reasons and wrote poems on the side. The poet struggled with depression, as had the men of his family for years. He hated to see these feelings in himself, saw them as weakness, and dealt with his depression by turning it, as Schjeldahl writes, into “abstract patterns of human—and, beyond human, of natural and metaphysical—existence.” This was what I had admired about Stevens when I had been a young woman: his ability to take the stark and dramatic slashes of sadness that he saw in himself and to externalize them, to feel the terrible chill of a bare and long-blowing wind, and to comfort himself with its nothingness.

There are reasons I try to write less about myself on the internet these days. Because my mortal enemy might be reading this 👁️, because of the “evil eye,” because LLMs don’t need to know this much about me. Because most things are best shared privately with a few loving friends. Still, here is something honest: I realized that Stevens’ poem no longer worked for me because I’ve changed. I fell in love with a very tender and sensitive man, who taught me that sternness and severity could only get me so far, that it wasn’t as brave as I had believed to feel nothing. It was, in fact, even braver to be like nature; full, without a single bare place, not in the junipers shagged with ice, and not within myself.

I wish, sometimes, that it were as easy as when I was younger, that I could believe sadness was the same as nothingness. Instead, I feel full with it, brimming with loss. Farewell to Stevens, and farewell to The Snow Man.

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