Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

The poem is a lyric, as it’s short and expresses the personal feelings of the poet and the poet’s speaker—that is, the speaker reveals 13 ways they feel a person can look at a blackbird. Since the poem has a defined goal, it qualifies as a didactic poem—it’s like a lesson, with Stevens teaching the reader 13 different ways to perceive a blackbird.

The poem also reads as a collection of 13 haikus. The haiku is a type of poem that began in Japan. A standard haiku has three lines, with five syllables for the first and last lines and seven syllables for the middle line. Like Stevens’s sections in this poem, haikus center on sharp portraits often involving nature. Matsuo Bashō is a famous Japanese haiku poet, and in his haiku “On a withered branch” (trans. John T. Carpenter, Met Museum, ca 1680), he focuses not on a blackbird but a crow:

On a withered branch,

a crow has come to perch—

at dusk in autumn.

Haiku uses imagery—precise language to create a vivid image—and so does Stevens. How to See is a critical theme in the poem, and Stevens helps the reader see when he details the “twenty snowy mountains” (Line 1) and zooms in on the “eye of the blackbird” (Line 3). In Section 1, the speaker’s tone is dispassionate. It’s like they’ve turned themselves into a camera and are impartially recording the image for the reader’s edification.

In Section 2, the tone becomes personal. An “I” enters the poem, but the “I”—the speaker—is mysterious. They don’t have a name, gender, or any identifying labels, yet they have “three minds” (Line 4). Using a simile—a comparison using a connecting word like “like”—the speaker compares their three minds to a tree with three blackbirds in it. The three blackbirds symbolize the speaker’s three minds, and the tree arguably symbolizes the speaker’s body. The speaker may have three minds because they’re a modern citizen of the world and therefore vulnerable to fragmentation and multiple realities (See: Background). The blunt “three minds” declaration jars, and it reveals the speaker’s often playful, provocative voice, toying with the usual idiom “of two minds,” meaning that a person is undecided about something.

In Section 3, the speaker’s tone goes back to dispassionate. The “I” disappears, and Stevens creates an image of a blackbird “whirled in autumn winds” (Line 7). The reader can see the blackbird tossed about by the wind. The speaker declares, “It was a small part of the pantomime” (Line 8). The speaker thinks of the wind and the blackbird as amusing theater. It entertains them, and they share their fascination with the reader. There are other parts of the pantomime, but the speaker doesn’t detail what they are—the speaker can often be vague, leaving the reader with questions. The obscure diction—word usage—pressures the reader to use their imagination to work out what’s happening.

The elusive tone continues in Section 4, with an unnamed woman and man entering the poem. Arguably, Stevens plays with stock tropes about love, gender, and religion. When people are deeply in love, they can feel like they “[a]re one” (Line 10). As the women and men become one being, Stevens upends the boundaries between separate human beings; when the woman, man, and blackbird become “one” (Line 12), he upends the boundaries between human beings and animals. This section may also allude to Adam and Eve. According to the Old Testament, Eve came from Adam’s rib—they’re one. Instead of sharing their union with God, they become one with the blackbird, who, like God, is everywhere.

In Section 5, the speaker gets personal and reflective, yet they remain obscure. The “beauty of inflections” (14) has multiple meanings. Inflections can mean a change in pitch or a grammatical change to the end of a word. What exactly the speaker is referring to with “innuendoes” (Line 15) is unclear, though an innuendo is a suggestive comment that’s not typically complimentary. The “whistling” (Line 16) blackbird reinforces the elusive tone. The speaker can’t decide if they like the blackbird more when they’re whistling or “just after” (Line 17) they’re whistling. Like inflections, innuendoes, and whistling, the speaker is hard to pin down, with The Fluidity of Reality as another key theme.

The speaker creates a haunting image in Section 6. Icicles are sharp and can be dangerous, and the diction—the word “barbaric” (Line 19)—turns the glass into a frightening and foul creature. The “shadow of the blackbird” (Line 20) bolsters the creepy image. It paces “to and fro” (Line 21) as if it’s nervous or agitated. The eerie “mood” (Line 22) comes from the shadow, but the cause is “indecipherable” (Line 24). There is mystery in the poem, and The Mystery of the World is a formidable theme throughout.

The tone in Section 7 becomes direct, with the speaker cajoling the “thin men of Haddam” (Line 25) to look at the blackbird instead of the “golden birds” (Line 26) in their fantasies. Stevens uses juxtaposition to highlight the difference. In other words, he places the blackbird beside the golden birds so the reader can tell them apart. The gold birds symbolize dreams of future wealth, while the blackbird represents the present. Instead of chasing gaudy affluence, they should look at what’s happening around the women’s feet.

Section 7, with its mention of women and men, also circles back to the woman and man in Section 4. The elusive tone produces several interpretations. Haddam sounds like “Adam,” recalling the biblical reading in Section 4, and the declarative “O” (Line 25) appears often in many translations of the Bible. In the Old Testament, Eve ate the forbidden fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil after being tempted by an animal, the serpent; here, it is blackbirds that walk with the women on the ground, suggesting a potential connection between the birds and true knowledge. Separately, the “thin” (Line 25) adjective makes the men seem weak—they lack the strength to see the blackbird. Perhaps the focus on material prosperity has left their minds malnourished.

The speaker becomes boastful in Section 8. Using repetition, they say “know” three times (Lines 30, 32, 34) to highlight their knowledge. Ever elusive, what the speaker knows remains abstract; only the fact that the blackbird is somehow “involved” (Line 33) in this knowledge is revealed. “Noble accents” (Line 30) and “lucid, inescapable rhythms” (Line 31) are rather vague. In The Necessary Angel, Stevens defines nobility as a person’s “spiritual height and depth,” adding, “Nothing could be more evasive or inaccessible” (p. 34). Though the rhythms are clear and unforgettable to the speaker, the speaker doesn’t clarify what these rhythms are, though the words “accents” (Line 30) and “rhythms” (Line 31) together suggest that Stevens might be referencing his own writing ability.

Yet the blackbird knows what’s going on. It’s as if the blackbird and the speaker are in cahoots. The emphasis on knowledge links back to the Tree of Knowledge and the biblical context. Read as a godlike symbol, the blackbird knows what’s in the speaker’s head because it arguably knows everything. Read as a malevolent, devilish symbol, the blackbird possesses this knowledge as a transgressive force.

In Section 9, the speaker goes back to an impersonal, objective tone. They create an image of a blackbird marking “the edge / Of one of many circles” (Lines 36-37). The circles represent the poem’s elusiveness. There are multiple circles, and there are multiple ways to read or look at Stevens’s poem. In the same vein, the circles can represent the varied perspectives people can have on anything, such as a blackbird; as the blackbird crosses the edge of one circle, out of the speaker’s line of sight, it enters another, a new circle and perspective.

Section 10 gives the poem a sexual tone. A bawd is a woman in charge of a brothel, and euphony is a pleasant sound, so the “bawds of euphony” (Line 40) suggest sexual sounds. If the bawds saw the blackbirds fly in “green light” (Line 39), suggesting that the bird is out in nature against the leaves of a tree, they’d “cry out sharply” (Line 41), indicating that blackbirds possess a carnal element. Alternately, “bawds” sounds like “bards” (an archaic word for poets), so Stevens is potentially being playful and mixing up bawds and bards to keep the reader alert.

The speaker adopts the tone of a storyteller in Section 11, and they narrate the journey of a man in a “glass coach” (Line 43). The haunting imagery that was present in Section 6 returns: The “shadow” (Line 46) of the man’s carriage scares him—he mistakes it for blackbirds. The dual symbology of the blackbirds continues. Like God or the Devil, blackbirds can make people tremble.

The image in Section 12 suggests a direct relationship between the blackbird and the external world. The river moves, so the “blackbird must be flying” (Line 49). The blackbird is one with its environment—like God, it’s in everything.

The speaker includes all three major themes in the final section. The speaker keeps teaching the reader How to See, and sight occurs through specifics: The speaker details the time of day, the weather, and the location of the blackbird. The Fluidity of Reality manifests as evening takes over the entire afternoon, and it “was snowing” (Line 51) and “it was going to snow” (Line 52)—the snow occupies a fluid place in time, in the past, present, and future. The Mystery of the World appears in the blackbird on “the cedar-limbs” (Line 54). What the blackbird is doing in the tree remains nebulous—another puzzle the reader has to solve on their own—though the appearance of the blackbird after the descriptions of time suggest that the bird may be equally eternal.