In Ronald Hoag’s short article “Wallace Stevens ‘The Snow Man’: An Important Title Pun” he analyzes the potential pun of the title and applies the result to the last and ultimately confusing stanza. He quotes and agrees with Susan B. Weston’s interpretation of the verbs ‘regard’ and ‘behold.’ He agrees that they are simply not used as to look upon something but have nonvisual in meaning, to “respect” and “embrace.” He creates this basis for his analysis of the title. Hoag states “’The Snow Man’ sounds very much like ‘This No Man.’ The next paragraph he italicizes six words in the last stanza: listener, listens, nothing, beholds, Nothing, and nothing. Hoag submits that these are not referring to an actual human but to the snow man himself. The snow man exists as a thing but only in the view of the observer, otherwise he merges back into the landscape. The snow man is “thus mindless and devoid of imagination, beholds both ‘Nothing that is not there’ (no-thing nut the scene) and “the nothing [no-thing] that is’ (himself as a part of the scene).” The author proceeds to state that the snow man listens to the misery of the wind because he is the “true beholder of the land.” Hoag believes that Stevens asks the readers to listen and this listening allows the reader to infer a human listener of the last stanza which ultimately changes the sense of what the reader has heard.
In reading Wallace Steven’s poem “The Snow Man,” I repeatedly forgot about the snowman to which the title refers because of his total absence from the language of the poem. I was not sure who “the listener” referred to and it is more than likely that it is the snowman. I feel like I made a mistake in assuming that the listener was a human listener. This mistake feels like one intended by Stevens as a lesson to the reader. The reader is not the center of attention here. It is the snowman. The pun in the title definitely adds to the effect of the snowman becoming part of the landscape despite his creation by man. The snow man is in between the natural world and the world of mankind and is forgotten. This is really great critical find!