Poem 13 was too neat an opportunity to pass up: thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird for the thirteenth entry in the series.
This time there is no translation between me and the poem. I read the thirteen short sections before looking up Stevens or anybody else’s explanation.
The poem
I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the black bird.
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.
This is the text printed in the first edition of Harmonium in 1923. That edition writes “black bird” as two words in the third line, then uses “blackbird” everywhere else.
First reading
I had to read this a couple of times before I had any sense of what I was reading or could begin to picture these little scenes.
The blackbirds are always there, but they seem almost incidental in each section. They are “involved in what I know,” as the poem says, but they do not feel like the key player.
After both my first and second readings, I was not sure I had a strong feeling about the poem at all.
Hearing it
I listened to Wallace Stevens read the poem himself. His reading did not join the pieces together for me. It maintained the scattered, seemingly disconnected little stories, with the blackbirds still the only thread between them.
The black birds and the very deliberate choice of thirteen sections seem to hint at something dark, foreboding or unlucky. Nothing in the poem itself really supports that reading, though.
The men of Haddam gave me the one hint of lament. They imagine golden, and presumably more beautiful, birds when there are perfectly beautiful blackbirds walking around them. Perhaps Stevens is complaining that they cannot see what is already there. That supports my sense of something mournful, even if it does not explain the rest of the poem.
What I learned
The poem first appeared in 1917 in Others: An Anthology of the New Verse, six years before Stevens included it in his first collection, Harmonium.
The most useful thing I learned came from Stevens himself. In a later letter, he described the sections as different kinds of “sensations.” I had been looking for a story or an argument to tie them together, but their scatteredness is part of the form.
The poem is often compared with haiku because of its compressed images, and with Cubism because it keeps turning around one subject. Both comparisons make sense up to a point. Stevens said that his interest in Japanese art was casual and that he had not studied haiku.
I could not find anything from Stevens suggesting that he chose thirteen because it was unlucky. The number and the black bird invite that reading, but it came from me rather than anything the poem says.
Haddam is a real town in Connecticut. Stevens later said that he liked its distinctly Yankee-sounding name, but he did not provide a single explanation for the golden birds. I still read the contrast plainly enough: the men invent something rare and ideal while missing the ordinary blackbird already walking among them.
Two of the stranger phrases also became less mysterious. “Bawds of euphony” was Stevens’s jab at critics who profit from other people’s pleasure in beautiful sound. An “equipage” is a carriage and its horses, so the traveller in section XI frightens himself by mistaking his own moving shadow for a flock of birds.
None of this turns the blackbird into the key player I was looking for. Perhaps it is enough that the bird remains involved while everything around it changes.
Rereading it
If scatteredness was Stevens’s intention, as the background reading suggests, then bravo. It worked on me. I am still left with a deeply disquieting feeling, especially when I read the poem aloud.
The line or image I kept thinking about
“It was evening all afternoon.”
That line makes no sense, and yet I know exactly what such an afternoon would look and feel like. What a beautiful sentence!