The poem opens with a speaker wandering "up and down town," half-wanting a drink, because nobody around seems willing to listen. The world offers "contrary ears," people who answer back or push against him rather than take him in. So he turns elsewhere, and the title starts to make sense: he is someone who listens, and he finds company in what other people have said and sung.
The images get stranger as the poem goes on. "Industrious sand of men's thoughts" suggests ideas that are busy and countless, but also small, shifting and hard to hold. The speaker says he loves this, though the word "sand" hints at something that slips away. Then he hears a eunuch sing "such a never-imagined ache," a voice carrying a loss he could not have pictured himself. The martyrs, in turn, send him to "volumes of shame," which suggests that suffering makes him look hard at his own conscience.
The mood is lonely but alert, a mix of restlessness, tenderness and quiet self-examination.