Death is absolute and without memorial, As in a season of autumn, When the wind stops,
One interpretive viewpoint asks whether Stevens is writing about any death, or rather, as Longenbach asserts, the death of the soldier—"and not an ambiguously 'fictive' soldier but Eugène Lemercier [the young French painter killed in 1915 whose letters were collected as Lettres d'un soldat and read by Stevens in the summer of 1917]."
In this respect "The Death of a Soldier" adopts the snow man's point of view, according to Bates.
The soldier has a "Lockean mind": "He is the sum of his impressions", Bates writes, "identical, in this instance, with the nothing he does behold".
(See the issue between Vendler and Bloom in the main Harmonium essay, the section "The musical Imagist".)