by Christopher Hall
“This business of a poet,” said Imlac, “is to examine, not the individual, but the species; to remark general properties and large appearances. He does not number the streaks of the tulip, or describe the different shades of the verdure of the forest. He is to exhibit in his portraits of nature such prominent and striking features as recall the original to every mind, and must neglect the minuter discriminations, which one may have remarked and another have neglected, for those characteristics which are alike obvious to vigilance and carelessness.” —Johnson, Rasselas
If poets are to take Imlac’s advice – and I’m not necessarily sure they should – then the proper season for doing so must be winter. No streaks of the tulip to distract us, and the verdure of the forest has been restricted to a very limited palette. Then the snow comes, and the world becomes a suggestion of something hidden, accessible only to memory or anticipation, like a toy under wrapping. Perhaps “general properties and large appearances” are accessible to us only as we gradually delete the details of life; we certainly don’t seem to have much access to them directly. This is knowledge by negation; winter is the supreme season for apophatic thinking.
In the poems I’m going to look at here, when snow comes, it often comes precisely as this kind of obliterator of detail, but it would be difficult to consistently see a restorative counter-movement toward the “knowledge of nature” and “modes of life,” as Imlac says later. Sometimes negation is only that, and loss is loss. Robert Penn Warren’s “Love Recognized” opens with deadening repetition and lack of precision:
There are many things in the world and you
Are one of them. Many things keep happening and
You are one of them, and the happening that
Is you keeps falling like snow
On the landscape of not-you, hiding hideousness, until
The streets and the world of wrath are choked with snow.
“Many things in the world,” “Many things keep happening” – the stammering opening is in the language of someone not sure how to articulate something, hoping that simply by rearranging the same words and making a few minor additions some meaning may be aimed at. The division made here between self and world is the simplest possible: “you” verses “not-you.” But at least the snow comes to hide “hideousness” and the “world of wrath.”
How many things have become silent? Traffic
Is throttled. The mayor
Has been, clearly, remiss, and the city
Was totally unprepared for such a crisis. Nor
Was I – yes, why should this happen to me?
I have always been a law-abiding citizen.
The cities I have lived in – Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa – are usually prepared for a snow onslaught, with the notable exception being Toronto in 1999, when a massive storm resulted, to the delight of every non-Torontonian Canadian, in the armed forces being called in. The effect of snowfall on a large city, however well-prepared, is always dramatic. There is nothing quite like silence where one is accustomed to noise, and that throttling of traffic results in cars making their way, cautious and lonely, towards a home where everybody has bottled themselves up. It’s an odd, but I think entirely appropriate, metaphor for love.
But you, like snow, like love, keep falling.
And it is not certain that the world will not be
covered in a glitter of crystalline whiteness.
Silence.
Again we have definition by absence and negation: “not certain,” “will not be covered.” And that final “Silence” – when we recognize love, do we recognize it like this, as the absence of something else? Perhaps it is enough that this “crystalline whiteness” brings something like calm.
If we are looking at the relation between forms of negation and snow, we of course must encounter Wallace Stevens’ “The Snow Man,” and the “mind of winter” with which it opens:
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;
That “must have” at the opening might imply something not yet achieved; these lines are not starved of detail, with their pine trees and junipers “shagged with ice” and spruces “rough in the distant glitter.” Emptiness seems to get closer after the semi-colon:
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.
The poem dramatizes what Penn Warren only hints at: the transition between the “you” and the “not-you.” In Penn Warren’s poem, we are part of the “many things” in the world, but there is also, it seems, a “not-you” into which we can fall. The repetitions of the words “sound” and “wind” in Stevens’s poem prepares us for the King Lear-esque repetition of the word “nothing” at the end. We are enjoined not to give in to the pathetic fallacy, to assign the human emotion “misery” to the sound of the wind and the leaves, and then we are taken a step further – immersion into “the nothing” of the scene. This would take us to somewhere where perception exists, but the subject does not – something we can only ever approximate, of course.
Mark Strand’s poem “Snowfall” echoes the threefold repetition in Steven’s poem:
Watching snow cover the ground, cover itself,
cover everything that is not you, you see
it is the downward drift of light
upon the sound of air sweeping away the air,
it is the fall of moments into moments, the burial
of sleep, the down of winter, the negative of night.
Penn Warren’s stuttering towards articulation here becomes a mere rejection of verbal variety in a world so transformed it simply doesn’t need many different words to describe it. Again, we see the appearance of the “not you” – the landscape defined by absence, not presence. The “fall,” as in Penn Warren’s poem, is a transition to a new state, one which can be tentatively described in positives – “the burial of sleep,” “the down of winter” – but which ultimately is defined as the negation of something: “the negative of night.” Not to say that this isn’t a precise image: snow falling at nighttime has its own kind of eeriness, a light that doesn’t come from anywhere and seems like it should not be there.
Stevens’s and Strand’s poems evoke, for me at least, something like an unsettling calm – a calm too close to death. Nothing like that is present in Louis MacNiece’s poem “Snow:”
The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.
World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.
Winter is an odd time for things to become “suddenly rich,” but that’s perhaps the point – only in such moments do we recognize that the world is in fact “incorrigibly plural,” incapable of the kinds of negations we’ve been looking at in other poems. If, however, there’s a level of jauntiness in these opening lines, the poem gets into darker shades as it closes:
And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes—
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one’s hands—
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.
MacNeice enacts the plural nature of “world” by refusing to give it a definite article, but there’s also a hint of the kind of failure of articulation we’ve seen in the other poems. The word “spiteful” comes at us without context, and it’s difficult to find the emotional center of the cryptic final time. The bay-window which separates the snow and the roses enacts a more permanent kind of separate between the inside and the outside, the self and the world. Where does the sudden beauty of a perception “on the tongue on the eyes in the ears in the palms of one’s hands” lead us to? Not, it seems, to any kind of ecstatic union with world – “you” and “not you” remain insoluble categories. One may cover the other, but they may not merge. The emptying of detail took us close to something – again, perhaps not quite Imlac’s general properties – but the mind cannot empty itself of itself – no perception without a subject. We are driven, and perhaps endlessly distracted, by those streaks on the tulip.
The mythologies of the time of year around the solstice – only a few hours away as I write this – are replete with the sudden emergence of light, and salvation, into a world of darkness. But I’ve reflected recently that if salvation does not come with calm, it isn’t worth much. And so perhaps these mythologies ought better to remind us not to hope for light but to luxuriate in the calmness of the world, its new lack of busyness and the clutter of details.
But, as Freud reminded us, to desire calm is to desire death, the final cure for all neurosis. We can only approach that thing defined by negation – the “not-you” – by eliminating the “you” altogether, a moment of exstasis hard-achieved if it is to come without actual death. As we careen into another new year, one no doubt to be just as filled with sumptuously pestiferous distractions and trivialities as the last few have been, I will try to remind myself of two things: if you’re anxious, at least you know you’re still alive, and that if spring comes, winter can’t be far behind.
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