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.
Sounds a bit like Eastern meditation or a Zen koan. Stevens was no stranger to Eastern thinking (he studied philosophy at Harvard), and in fact the whole poem echoes an idea out of Buddhism: that the emptying of the self leads to a higher state. 
 
 The listener’s utterly objective, realistic, emptied-out consciousness (“nothing himself”) projects no imaginative fictions (“nothing that is not there”) onto the emptiness of the snow scene around him. 
 After a string of negations (the listener is nothing, and his mind is empty of anything that’s not right in front of him) Stevens upends all the negativity, closing the poem with a note of affirmation. The man sees “the nothing that IS.” Nothing, including himself, has an intrinsic existence, but the man is still beholding something.
The Snow Man