I

Among twenty snowy mountains, The only moving thing

Was the eye of the blackbird.

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.

What is it: Just as it says on the tin, Stevens comes at the humble blackbird in 13 different ways - describing environments, perspectives, moments in time, and feelings associated with the presence of this bird in his home state of Connecticut.

Scope for Study / Verdict: With its neatly partitioned sections, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird initially seems to lend itself to easy digestion. On closer inspection though, Stevens seeks to break the idea of an overarching narrative and subverts the reader's expectations in terms of linking the sections through any unifying theme other than the mention of blackbirds. Students should instead be asked to consider what Stevens describes as 'the sensations' that are evoked throughout the poem, the unusual haiku-influenced structure employed to draw the reader's attention to each carefully-chosen detail, and the genre of modernism as a lens through which to examine the poem's wider context.

Length: 13 stanzas, ranging from 2 to 6 lines each.

Source: First published in 1917 as part of Others: An Anthology of the New Verse, a poetry collection edited by Alfred Kreymborg. More currently it can be found in the 2011 anthology Selected Poems by Wallace Stevens. The poet was a Pulitzer Prize winner and one of the most respected modernist poets of his age.