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Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
Wallace Stevens
Among twenty snowy mountains
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
A man and woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflexions
Or the beauty of innuendos,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
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.
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?
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
of one of many circles.
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar limbs.
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Black Birds in Literature
A Cyclical Survey
Once, on a midnight dreary,
He woke with something in his head.
A hot sound, an ache
For the lost Lenore.
Could it be a bird?
Years later, Rossetti
Writes of the departed lover's grief.
The black bird,
Now known in reverse.
He finishes his review of
Dickens' "Barnaby Rudge" for "Graham's".
Knowingly, he likes
That bit about the Raven.
Bird and poet
Are now both one.
Bird and poet and loneliness
Are too many.
O, quaff!
I don't know what's kindest:
To climactically blindfold his soul,
Or send a damaging highwayman.
Be gone, awkward bird!
Maggots, bees swarm about
A blighted flock.
A hot, black brook beckons.
O fragile Tippi Hedren,
Why must the inky birds now attack you?
Do you not notice them
In neat rows on the
Wires above you?
Fibonacci drew in the sand.
Fanatics waited in an ambush;
A bird followed contently.
In "The Red Wheelbarrow",
Williams finagles the bird
To be a white chicken.
The climactic ending:
Babylon is buffeted, fallen.
A month of stench.
Poe went to see Hiawatha
Who, though composed just after,
Also is involved with
A mysterious black
Flock of birds.
The mammoth Afghan animal lands,
Flattening an excited blue finch
And eight now-defunct Bantams.
ENVOY:
It be night.
Chad B from the Black Rap Delegation
Cranks up the hot music with know-how
While watching the homicide
Below the dark window.
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