必须怀有冬日的心境,
方能领略眼前的万树一片冰晶雪白；
只有经受长久的严寒,
才会欣赏松枝银装素裹在斜阳中闪烁的光采；
寒风啸啸,落叶嘶嘶,
冬天的强音声震天外；
苍茫大地响起同一的奏鸣,
雪上的聆听者把悲情全都抛开：
自身虚无才能审视不存在的虚无,
自身不存在方可洞察虚无的存在.
The Snow Man is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry,Harmonium.It was first published in 1921 and is therefore in the public domain.
Sometimes classified as one of Stevens' "poems of epistemology",it can be read as an expression of the naturalistic skepticism that he absorbed from his friend and mentor,Santayana.It is skeptical that anything can be known about a substantial self (Santayana was an epiphenomenalist) or indeed about substances in the world apart from the perspectives that human imagination brings to "the nothing that is" when it perceives "junipers shagged with ice",etc.There is something wintry about this insight,which Stevens captures in The Necessary Angel by writing,"The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us."
The poem is an expression of Stevens' perspectivism,leading from a relatively objective description of a winter scene to a relatively subjective emotional response (thinking of misery in the sound of the wind),to the final idea that the listener and the world itself are "nothing" apart from these perspectives.See Gubbinal and Nuances of a theme by Williams for comparisons.
B.J.Leggett construes Stevens's perspectivism as commitment to the principle that "instead of facts we have perspectives,none privileged over the others as truer or more nearly in accord with things as they are,although not for that reason all equal." This principle that "underlies Nietzschean thought" is central to Leggett's reading.It may be observed that Stevens's remark in the passage quoted above from The Necessary Angel falls short of conforming to that principle,implying a condition of `the world about us' that is distinct from the perspectives we bring to it.