For the TAW challenge this week: blackbird.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
by Wallace Stevens
- 1
- Among twenty snowy mountains
- The only moving thing
- Was the eye of the blackbird
- 2
- I was of three minds,
- Like a tree
- In which there are three blackbirds.
- 3
- The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
- It was a small part of the pantomime.
- 4
- A man and a woman
- Are one.
- A man and a woman and a blackbird
- Are one.
- 5
- I do not know which to prefer
- The beauty of inflections
- Or the beauty of innuendoes.
- The blackbird whistling
- Or just after.
- 6
- 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.
- 7
- O thin men of Haddam,
- Why to do you imagine golden birds?
- Do you not see how the blackbird
- Walks around the feet
- of the women about you?
- 8
- I know noble accents
- And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
- But I know, too,
- That the blackbird is involved
- In what I know.
- 9
- When the blackbird flew out of sight,
- It marked the edge
- Of one of many circles.
- 10
- At the sight of blackbirds
- Flying in a green light,
- Even the bawds of euphony
- Would cry out sharply.
- 11
- He rode over Connecticut
- In a glass coach.
- Once, a fear pierced him,
- In that he mistook
- The shadow of his equipage
- For blackbirds.
- 12
- The river is moving.
- The blackbird must be flying.
- 13
- It was evening all afternoon.
- It was snowing
- And it was going to snow.
- The blackbird sat
- In the cedar-limbs.
1923
