22 pages • 44 minutes read
Wallace StevensThirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1917A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Blackbird
The blackbird symbolizes God due to its omnipresence. Like God, the blackbird has a universal nature. The blackbird is “one” (Line 11) with men and women, as people who believe in God tend to believe that God is a part of them. God is also believed to be all-knowing, and the blackbird is aware of the speaker’s thoughts, with the speaker declaring, “[T]he blackbird is involved / In what I know” (Lines 33-34). The inclusion of “Haddam” (Line 25) arguably alludes to the Garden of Eden, turning the man and woman in Section 4 into Adam and Eve and the blackbird into the godlike entity presiding over the heavenly place. As a symbol of God, the blackbird gives the poem a spiritual power.
Conversely, the blackbird can represent Satan—a transgressive or evil force. Its connection to knowledge alludes to the Tree of Knowledge and the fruit that God forbade Adam and Eve to eat. The image of the blackbird walking around “the feet / Of the women” (Lines 28-29) in Haddam furthers the serpent/Devil imagery, with the blackbird slithering near the women on the ground, possibly tempting them to transgress. The chilling images of the blackbird in Sections 1 and 13 also suggest a cunning, scheming symbolism. Due to its fluidity and mystery, the blackbird can symbolize either the Devil or God. In both cases, the bird possesses and symbolizes a profound knowledge, one that can be comforting, unsettling, or both, depending on which of the 13 ways the blackbird is seen.
Nobility
The speaker symbolizes nobility, and they present themselves as noble when they announce, “I know noble accents” (Line 30). In The Necessary Angel, Stevens argues that nobility is paramount for the poet. Nobility accounts for the poet’s “being and for that occasional ecstasy, or ecstatic freedom of the mind, which is his special privilege” (35). The speaker showcases their nobility through their ecstatic and free images of the blackbird: They can see the blackbird in its multiple iterations. Minus their nobility, they’d lack the mystical liberty to witness the elusive bird. The “thin men of Haddam” (Line 25) are not noble, so they can’t see the blackbird. They’re not ecstatic or free: They’re emaciated in mind and spirit. Via juxtaposition of the blackbird and the golden birds, Stevens reinforces the speaker’s nobility. The reader can compare the speaker with the thin men and observe the presence of nobility and freedom of mind in the speaker and the lack of it in the weak men.
Danger
The world can be a dangerous place, and in the poem, the blackbird and the environments it appears in are often dangerous themselves or are adjacent to danger. The blackbird’s moving eye in Section 1 turns it into a watchful predator, plotting to make its odious move in an unforgiving, mountainous landscape. The shadows in Sections 6 and 11 further the haunting characterization of the blackbird. It’s as if the blackbird is a ghost or a demon stalking the landscape. In Section 11, the shadow, thought to be a group of blackbirds but actually the shadow of the carriage, scares the man inside—“a fear pierced him” (Line 44). The blackbird is a part of the world, and the world is a threat. The icicles take over the window, and the speaker labels the glass “barbaric” (Line 19). The world can be cruelly oppressive, and the motif of the world’s danger goes back to the context of Modernism (See: Background), the deadly World War I, and the increasing awareness that the world is a violent, fragmented place—not a holistic, united sphere.
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By Wallace Stevens
