“The Snow Man” appeared in Poetry magazine in 1921 and then in the 1923 “Harmonium,” the first book of poetry from Wallace Stevens (1879–1955). The book was not a success, and Stevens made sure with his magazine publications that poetry readers saw just how good he was before publishing his next books, especially “Ideas of Order” (1936) and “The Man with the Blue Guitar” (1937).

Probably by the time of Stevens’s death — and certainly by the 1970s — some of the poems from “Harmonium” had become part of the canon of English verse. Here at the Sun, we’ve already run “The Emperor of Ice Cream” and “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon” from that first book of his poetry. But there may be no clearer example of Stevens’s ascent in reputation than “The Snow Man,” which is now inescapable, reprinted in any standard anthology as the opening of Stevens’s greatest hits — and Poem of the Day here on Stevens’s birthday, October 2.

It’s usual these days to take “The Snow Man” as a poem of epistemology, an examination of how we know. And that’s not a bad reading, given the poem’s famous opening, “One must have a mind of winter.” But given the poem’s equally famous conclusion, “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is,” Stevens is out after bigger game: Not simply the easy “Gosh, maybe things aren’t quite what they seem,” but the more difficult metaphysical question of what is real, such that we might misapprehend it.

In this reading, the key word is “misery.” The poem has five three-line stanzas of free verse, tempered enough by internal rhymes and near-rhymes, and a mostly iambic meter, to give a hint of a formal poem. Stevens uses the poem to suggest that the human observer brings emotion to reality — seeing through emotive lenses.

Much as Robert Frost said of birds in “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things” (the Sun’s Poem of the Day last fall), Stevens knows that the natural order in winter contains none of the misery we ascribe to it. The precise descriptions of the snow, ice, trees, and leaves lead us toward a conclusion: the sheer independent reality of external objects do not depend on us, and they require us to become “no things,” the way they are, to see their truth.

The Snow Man 
by Wallace Stevens

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.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.