Course:13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens
| CRWR 501P 003 |
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| Advanced Writing of Poetry |
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V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
This poem by Wallace Stevens, from his first book of poetry Harmonium and published in 1917, is exactly what its title proclaims: a poem in 13 parts, each offering a new way of looking at a blackbird. Sort of. Really, its meditations are much more far-reaching: time, scale, unity/division, the limits of understanding, wonder, mortality, metaphysics. It is a poem with sweep and scope. Inspired by haiku, but not conforming to any kind of syllable count (not unlike Jane Hirshfield's short 'pebbles' poems), each stanza achieves a stunning degree of compression.
II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
This is the poem that first introduced me to joys of the formal elements that I have been exploring in my apprenticeship this year: surprise and turn. In part II (above), Stevens surprises us with each new line, layering meaning, until we end up much further than seems possible in such a short time. The shifts of scale and perspective are truly filmic, but written before the language of film was commonplace. The first stanza is the closest thing to a crash-zoom that I can imagine in poetry.
I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
At times riddling, cryptic and impenetrable, and at times wry and hilarious, this poem evokes strong emotion without prescribed meaning. Like in haiku, something true about our sensory reality is observed, but Stevens accomplishes this while simultaneously making time and space feel illusory.
XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
Every time I read this poem, it startles me.