In the Library
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
Wallace Stevens, 1923
- Form
- Form Poem
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 5 minutes
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 0k words
£1.99
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Among twenty snowy mountains, The only moving thing Was the eye of the black bird.
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- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Robert Frost
Frost does the same thing, watching a winter scene until it becomes a meditation, but narrows thirteen glances down to a single quiet stop in the snow.
£1.99
The Waste Land
T.S. Eliot
Eliot does the same thing, assembling one vision out of fragments and multiple voices, but spreads the method across five sprawling movements instead of thirteen brief glances.
£1.99
Song of Myself
Walt Whitman
Whitman does the same thing, cataloguing one subject from many angles at once, but multiplies thirteen ways of seeing a blackbird into fifty-two sections of a whole self.
£1.99
About the book
Among twenty snowy mountains, the only moving thing was the eye of the black bird. That is the whole first section, and it has been rearranging the way people see for a century. Wallace Stevens gives you thirteen glimpses of one bird and refuses to join them up: a shadow crossing a window filled with icicles, a man and a woman and a blackbird counted as one, the choice between the beauty of inflections and the beauty of innuendoes, the whistling or just after. Stevens said the poem was not a collection of epigrams or of ideas but of sensations, and that is the gift of it. Nothing is explained, and nothing needs to be; the mind is caught in the act of looking, and each new angle makes the bird stranger and the world larger. By the end the light has gone early, it is snowing and going to snow, and the blackbird sits in the cedar-limbs while you go on turning it over.