Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
by Wallace Stevens
I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.
XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.
XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.
XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
Current Writing Prompt
In the early-career Wallace Stevens poem, ''Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,'' the reader is presented with something seen from different perspectives. Perception is subjective, so these short stanzas shift and evolve but are not directly connected, other than by their subject. Each haiku-like stanza is its own way of looking at the blackbird.
Two selections from Jane Kenyon's poem "Three Songs at the End of Summer" illustrate how her poem also looks (in 12 small stanzas divided into 3 sections/songs) at something more abstract from different perspectives.
A white, indifferent morning sky,
and a crow, hectoring from its nest
high in the hemlock, a nest as big
as a laundry basket....
Crickets leap from the stubble,
parting before me like the Red Sea.
The garden sprawls and spoils.
Spruce, inadequate, and alien
I stood at the side of the road.
It was the only life I had.
Is Stevens' blackbird a symbol? Its color might suggest mystery. Its appearance in the poem shows a kind of interconnectedness as it separate from and also part of nature. If it is a symbol of the world itself, it can represent the complexity of our perception. Stevens gives us the bird in the natural world (a bird in the snow) to the psychological (a man mistaking a shadow for a blackbird).
What is the "correct" way to perceive the blackbird or reality? Of course, there isn't one way because our understanding of the world is shaped by our individual perspective.
In your poem, be attentive to the details of your subject and its surroundings. Present multiple interpretations without a need to select one as correct. You need not have 13 ways - though many 13 ways parodies of Stevens' poem have been written. You could have as few as two ways of seeing. Your subject can be a thing (a river, a painting), a person (a lover, a baby), a scene (a baseball game, a thunderstorm) or something we can't literally see (terror, jealousy, the end of summer).
Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was an American modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut.
He never learned how to drive and composed most of his poems while walking to work. In his long poem “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” he wrote “Perhaps / The truth depends on a walk around a lake, // A composing as the body tires…”
Many of Stevens's poems, like "Anecdote of the Jar", "The Man with the Blue Guitar", "The Idea of Order at Key West", "Of Modern Poetry", and "Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction", deal with the art of making art and poetry in particular. His Collected Poems (1954) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1955
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