On `thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Blackbird`, By Wallace Stevens

Writing a commentary on ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ poses difficulties – it seems almost designed to be elusive to traditional critical analysis. It is composed of thirteen different ideas or images whose only connection, at first glance, seems to be the mention of blackbird. Otherwise, they appear totally discrete, jumping from twenty mountains to the unity of man and woman, from a green light to a man in a glass coach. It is initially a struggle to identify a thread of continuity between them besides the obvious link of the blackbird. The poem is written as one work, but determined to not be read as one work, or it is obstinate in resisting the idea that a work has to be narratively or thematically coherent. A fruitful approach may involve reading each individual stanza as a self-contained work, with the hope that a common thread (besides the blackbird) may appear and reveal a theme which unifies the poem, in whole or at least in part.

Beginning with stanza I: Among twenty snowy mountains / The only moving thing / Was the eye of the blackbird.’ It is something like a haiku, though not strictly within the syllable limits. It is a striking image of natural stillness with a quality of whimsicality to it in the singsong internal rhyme created by ‘twenty snowy‘, both words which plunge into the vowel sound before sharply rising with the final y. The line is rising and falling in reverse, with unstressed syllables beginning and ending in ‘Among’ and ‘mountains’, and two plunges and rises in between, like the shape of the mountains drawn in phonetics. The rising and falling continues with ‘The only moving thing / Was the eye of the blackbird’. Eight, six, and seven syllables – twenty-one, and there are twenty mountains, with one eye of the blackbird. It may be Stevens’ little joke. In a mere three lines, an image is created and given depth by euphony until it is complex.

The departure of stanza II from I is radical enough to exemplify Stevens’ refusal to cohere all by itself – ‘I was of three minds / Like a tree / In which there are three blackbirds.’ Again, there is lingual and phonetic play – ‘three’ becomes ‘tree’, a tree which resembles the speaker because it contains three blackbirds, ‘three’ being stripped of a letter to become ‘tree’, then being reshuffled into ‘there’, and returned to three again. The idea of the stanza is circular – he is of three minds, he is like a tree, in which there are three blackbirds, like this three minds – and so is its language. The whimsicality is now in the letters as much as the sounds.

Stanza III raises the idea of a ‘pantomime’ – the pantomime of nature in which the blackbird whirls? The blackbird is only #145a small part’ of it, suggesting a grand interpretation like the above, but Stevens’ sustained self-reference in ‘Blackbird’ raises the question of whether the poem is itself the pantomime, and if so, of what it imitates. While I-III at least followed the blackbird in nature (to varying degrees), any sense of continuity is dashed to pieces by IV – ‘A man and a woman / Are one. / A man and a woman and a blackbird / Are one.’ How to address this? The repetition of ‘Are one’, at least, continues the circularity of three minds and three blackbirds, or the rising and falling of stanza I. Stevens has been whimsical throughout – perhaps IV can be assumed to be lines written to give the appearance of profundity whilst actually being nonsensical, something to frustrate people convinced there is meaning to mine. After all, a pantomime doesn’t have depth. It’s an easy way to justify a retreat from attempting to make sense of IV, but there seems little to say. A man and a woman are one – that is a traditional idea. How does the blackbird come into it? Perhaps the incongruity is the point. The blackbird is an unknown, as the man and the woman, in union, still do not know each other. Or it looks forward to the ‘thin men of Haddam’ in VII, who imagine ‘golden birds’, not seeing ‘how the blackbird walks around the feet / Of the women’ about them. The blackbird is between the man and the woman, between the men and the golden birds.

Consider the blackbird’s symbolic significance. It is a common bird. It has a rich song, but sober – black, of course – plumage. It is prosaic. The blackbird is ordinary life intervening between the men and their imagined golden birds, walking around the feet – not a place of fantasy or wonder – of the women about them. Perhaps the prosaic nature of the blackbird is what invites ‘fear’ in the man of XI who rides over Connecticut in something as grand as a ‘glass coach’ – the ‘shadow of his equipage’, the physical trace of his opulence, can be mistaken for something as common as blackbirds. The thirteen ways in which Stevens looks at the blackbird reveal, to some extent, what it means to him. It represents prosaic beauty – the commonness of it is essential, because that gives it the sense of universality, or involvement in things central to human knowledge and human existence which is apparent in ‘A man and a woman and a blackbird / Are one.’, or in ‘But I know, too, / That the blackbird is involved / In what I know’ - in VIII. The opposition of ‘noble accents’, ‘lucid rhythms’, and other signs of sophistication with the prosaic blackbird is continued in X, where the simple, striking beauty of ‘the sight of blackbirds flying in a green light’, would make even those Stevens whimsically dismisses as ‘the bawds of euphony’ ‘cry out sharply’. It touches something primal and basic in them. As Stevens acknowledges in VIII, the noble accents of the educated bawds of euphony are underpinned by the music of nature, of common life. The man in the glass coach follows on from those bawds, and the theme appears similar – that of the blackbird as some sort of quotidian truth interfering in artificial sophistication.

Of course, there are a full thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird in this poem – it means more to Stevens than a representation of nature, or of ordinary existence in microcosm. The blackbird is also, in stanza V, a creator of music - ‘The beauty of inflections’ - and one who illumines the beauty of the ‘innuendoes’, the fading echoes or the broken tension of the moment after the blackbird’s whistling. That is poetry itself – the word, and the resonance of the word in the reader’s mind. Stevens does not know ‘which to prefer’ because it is an impossible choice. They are both separate and indivisible, like the man and the woman or the man, the woman, and the blackbird. The blackbird inflects and creates innuendoes as Stevens composes, and begets interpretations. Like the blackbird itself, Stevens marks the edge of one of ‘many circles’ even as he seems to fly out of sight with his more abstruse stanzas.

VI is the longest of the stanzas. A long window filled by icicles with ‘barbaric glass’ (presumably over its own civilised glass see also the glass coach), over which the shadow of the blackbird crosses. ‘The mood / Traced in the shadow / An indecipherable cause.’ – the blackbird is the only moving thing, but it cannot have traced something in its own shadow, since its shadow is what is moving and providing the canvas on which is traced the ‘indecipherable cause’. The image of winter and the shadow of the blackbird playing over a window assailed by icicles has a dark, sombre, quiet mood. Does the mood trace the cause? The sentence is baffling to parse. Is the mood itself the indecipherable cause, traced in the shadow? A comma after the second ‘shadow’ of the stanza would suggest so. But there is none, so the mood is made an actor in the scene despite being a quality of the scene itself. Our conceptions of moods and shadows and causes struggle to accommodate that notion. The mood traces an indecipherable cause, but as a mood which is actively tracing, it is itself an indecipherable cause – an abstract quality growing fingers, running them through a shadow. The shadow of the blackbird creates the mood and animates it so the mood may act on it. The concept is recursive and impossible to separate into a conventional chain of cause and effect. It is perhaps more difficult to parse than ‘A man and a woman / Are one. / A man and a woman and a blackbird / Are one.’ Therein lies a parallel – the blackbird expressing, or involved in, some structural and intrinsic component of thought, of reality, as it is in IV or VIII, or even IX, since the process of the mood - which traces or is traced in the shadow which made it – is a circle, one of the many of which the blackbird marks the edge. The many circles are interesting in a poem with thirteen ways, thirteen perspectives of looking at or conceptualising a blackbird, because we each have a circle around us which contains all we know, a frame of reference, our perspective. The many circles are concentric, ever-widening perspectives from which to view the blackbird or the universe. The blackbird in the domestic sphere, about the feet of the women of Haddam the blackbird in the autumn winds, a part of nature’s pantomime the blackbird in the grand setting of twenty mountains the blackbird as one with man and woman, with all of humanity the blackbird involved in human knowledge the blackbird as an ‘indecipherable cause’ – a phrase with a resonance that reaches far past its context of a shadow on a windowsill to suggest something mysterious and universal.

The two concluding stanzas. XII: ‘The river is moving. / The blackbird must be flying.’ Again we see the same ambiguity of cause and effect. Does the blackbird follow the river or does the river move because the blackbird is flying, an indecipherable cause? Are they inextricable, like the mood and the shadow, part of nature’s pantomime? The river is moving, Stevens specifically states, in the present continuous. Rivers always move – they flow, raising the question of why he specifies that it is moving and infers that the blackbird must be flying, as if they are linked. The subtle incongruities of Stevens’ phrasing makes us question entirely prosaic things. ‘The only moving thing / Was the eye of the blackbird.’ Do birds’ eyes move independently? The icicles fill a window with barbaric glass – a glass window blocked up by ice, or an open window filled with icicles? The river – something which moves by definition – is moving. His poem strains the relationship between language and reality with sentences like ‘The mood / Traced in the shadow / An indecipherable cause.’ XIII relaxes the burden on language, its whimsicality confined to ‘It was evening all afternoon.’ There is a sense of comfortable resignation in ‘It was snowing / And it was going to snow.’ The stretched, strained immediacy of the present continuous is relieved by the reified future. It is snowing and it will snow. The blackbird sits in the cedar-limbs. The pantomime is over and all is still. The blackbird moved its eye in I, it whirled in III, whistled in V, crossed to and fro in VI, walked in VII, flew in IX, X, and XII, and now it finally ends its journey, and the poem with it.

Common threads have emerged in the poem which unify it, defying my initial impressions. These elements of continuity are the associations of the blackbird – with ordinary existence, with the creation of art, with knowledge, with a sort of Hegelian inseparability of cause and effect. Stevens runs rings around his readers, but rewards those who will follow.