And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less --
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.
Not surprisingly, these lines often prompt comparisons with Wallace Stevens's "The Snow Man" -- and not merely on account of the snow.
I still find it hard to credit, but I first encountered "The Snow Man" in a high school literature textbook when I was 14 or 15 years old. (The fact that it was even in the textbook amazes me: did the editors have a misguided notion of the capabilities of American youth? Or, in those faraway days, did they harbor grandiose hopes for the future of literature in this fair land?) For some unaccountable reason, I recall that the poem was accompanied by an illustration of a jaunty snow man with the usual stove-pipe hat, wool scarf, coal lumps for eyes, and a carrot for a nose. Of course, I had no idea what the poem was about.
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; 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.
Wallace Stevens, Harmonium (1923).
What does it mean? Here is what Stevens said: "I shall explain The Snow Man as an example of the necessity of identifying oneself with reality in order to understand it and enjoy it." Letter from Wallace Stevens to Hi Simons, April 18, 1944, Letters of Wallace Stevens (1966), page 464. I take this statement with a grain of salt. After all, Stevens also said: "I have the greatest dislike for explanations. As soon as people are perfectly sure of a poem they are just as likely as not to have no further interest in it; it loses whatever potency it had." Letter from Wallace Stevens to Ronald Lane Latimer, November 15, 1935, Letters of Wallace Stevens, page 294.
Maybe it is best to approach the poem from another angle entirely. Here is something that Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote some time before Stevens wrote "The Snow Man":
The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists -- and if it did exist, it would have no value.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Proposition 6.41 (1921) (translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness; emphasis in original). Or perhaps it boils down to the final Proposition of the Tractatus: "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence." Or, translated differently: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."