poetry friday

Last week I did something bad to my back and had to lie around for a while. Wounded and indolent though I am, I still know my duty. On Poetry Friday, the word must go out.

This is a poem by Wallace Stevens. When I was in college I hated Wallace Stevens because he worked for an insurance company and wrote poems I didn't understand. Now I love Wallace Stevens because he worked for an insurance company and wrote poems I don't understand. Like this one:

The Snow Man

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; 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.