listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
In characteristic Stevens style this stanza is noticeably repetitive. The three mentions of "nothing" seem only to emphasise the emptiness that he experiences in this desolate winter landscape, this "bare place", where there is only "misery in the sound of the wind" for company. In light of this poem, it seems unsurprising that Stevens has another entitled 'Depression before Spring'.
The bleak sense of complete emptiness in a winter landscape is slightly reduced in 'Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird' in which Stevens opens with the assertion that
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
Minor comfort, perhaps, but life nevertheless where previously there was none. It is not until Spring, however, that Stevens seems to truly perk up, noting in 'The Sun this March' how
The exceeding brightness of this early sun
Makes me conceive how dark I have become
Indeed this half-rhyming couplet in jaunty iambic pentameter seems to echo in its form the joy Stevens feels now that Winter has passed.
For me, Stevens' success is in managing to take a cliched motif such as the age-old winter-depression/spring-happiness metaphor and imbue it with a new found beauty and life. It strikes me that sometimes that might be all a poet can do to overcome the daunting emptiness of the blank page.
Even if the idea at the heart of a poem might be easily dreamt up by another writer, the language in which you express it will always be your own.
The Sky from a Window
Almost imperceptibly,
Slow rumbles of cloud
Blow over a curving mound
Of budding trees.
They're eaten by the peeling white
Of a verticle gable wall
And replaced by brighter sky
With a patch of blue.
Meanwhile other poets,
Perhaps just two doors down,
Pen the same thought
Differently, in canon.
By Liam Gilbert (April 2011)
