Interpretation of "For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is." [closed]

Without getting too wrapped up in a literary analysis, which is not the purview of this site, I have to mention that Stevens was a poet whose entire subject was, in his words, "the poem of the act of the mind."

Note that it is the act of the mind that concerns him, not just the mind itself. It is a conscious construction that is not beholden to any other ideas that have gone before. There is no "heavy historical sail" (to quote him from another poem), no "holy hush of ancient sacrifice" (again), only ideas that are reduced to their essence by observation.

Within the poem itself, Stevens negates the cliché of hearing "misery in the sound of the wind"; he wants to clear his mind and be an observer who has fresh thoughts about snow and cold and juniper boughs "shagged with ice"—thoughts that get to the essence of things by unencumbering them from the detritus of prior imaginings. He wants to be nothing, to bring nothing, but simply to observe and, by observing, to create a new thing.

But to create the new one must destroy the old. In "Poetry Is a Destructive Force" he writes:

That's what misery is,
Nothing to have at heart.
It is to have or nothing.

Sound familiar? This is a constant theme in his work. Dissertations have been written about Stevens and his ideas about observation, destruction of old ideas about poetry and what to put in their place. As he says in "Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself," it is "a new knowledge of reality." Read more of his works ("Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," "The Idea of Order at Key West," "Sunday Morning," and so on) to see this theme developed further.

Wallace Stevens describes how an observer might respond to nature, something utterly different from the human experience, without pushing their own interpretation upon it.

For instance, the punchline in the third stanza, continuing off the first, is that one must have "a mind of winter" to observe what is literally in nature and "not to think / of any misery in the sound of the wind." Hearing misery in the wind would invoke a pathetic fallacy (Wikipedia), attributing the observer's own emotion to nature. It would violate the listener's desire (marked by the line break) not to think.

The trouble for the speaker is that humans cannot avoid metaphor (let alone thinking) entirely, so it's exceptionally difficult to describe nature without a human touch. So the last stanza uses wordplay with nothing to at least approach an outside-human description of nature:

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Nothing appears three times in three meanings:

1. Nothing himself - the listener after having negated his own ego, only listens and beholds, and only takes in.

2. Nothing that is not there - the listener takes in nothing that is not there; that is to say, he may only take in what is there. So he invokes no pathetic fallacy - no misery in the wind.

3. The nothing that is - the listener finds something else in nature. This is metaphorical, but unlike misery, it does not describe a person's feeling. Rather, the listener finds the absence of human mindfulness.

On this point, Anthony Channell Hilfer in " 'The Nothing that Is': Representations of Nature in American Writing" (Texas Studies in Literature and Language Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 54, No. 2, Summer 2012) describes the poem as an attempt to negate the human presence when observing nature:

So the joke of 'The Snow Man' is that, finally, one cannot get around the pathetic fallacy. Yet the poem does go in the direction of doing so, chilling out human presence to something at least approaching zero-degree reality, an empathy with Nature exhibited more as a profoundly felt absence than as a presence. It does this by explicitly repudiating pathos as a proper response; pathos would involve the error of beholding "something that is not there." But the nothing that is has an evident sublimity, especially in its reduction of the human onlooker. (p. 231)