The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens Case Study

Assignment Task

Discuss nature and human consciousness in William Wordsworth’s “I Wandled Lonely as a Cloud,” Wallace Steven’s “The Snow Man,” Robert Service’s “The Creation of Sam McGee,” and/ or Adam Dickinson’s “Cedar Canvas.” In your approach to this topic, you may wish to research Romanticism (Wordsworth/ McGee), Modernism (Stevens) and/ or postmodernism (Dickinson). In what ways do one or more of these poets depict nature as a means to making a larger comment on human consciousness and/ or the human condition?

Cedar Canvas

There is something in the way canoes come from a carpenter's mind; the weight of an acuity played out in the planning. The emergence is monkish, is already a thoroughly conceived community. When the carpenter thinks, he is running through branches back into the wood, reversing the carving, moving as something both ripened and green.

When the ribs are steamed, the wood is bent back again as a sapling, the soft plates of its bones denatured, turned by the carpenter into barrel chests, into the diaphragm of a man who has spent a lifetime laughing high in the mountains at the abject beginnings of rivers.

The carpenter laughs in his hands; you can see it balled there in blisters. You can see that the splinters go into him with alacrity, with the pleasure and rhythm of song. And when he turns to you in the sawshed, where you are a boy let loose for the first time with hammers, and gets you to sand down the gunwales, you take your biggest breaths; you slip into the wood as a man shoves away from the shore.

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