The Bare Place

In the first three stanzas of the poem the author describes a hypothetical place in winter, during the month of January. In the fourth stanza a more concrete locale is tied to this earlier description. This is a spot “Full of the same wind / That is blowing in the same bare place / For the listener, who listens in the snow” (11-13). This suggests a specific desolate spot with a lone human subject witnessing a simple scene that nonetheless baffles human cognition and obliterates the human subject as an epistemic entity.

The Subject’s Imaginary

Wallace Stevens simultaneously describes a forbidding winter landscape and twins this with a certain mental imaginary attuned to this external landscape. The “mind of winter” (1) that the author asserts is a requisite to be able to truly take in the scene he describes without crumbling before it.