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Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

I
1]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
2]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,
3]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.

First publication: Others (Dec. 1917): 109-11

Notes

1] In a letter to L. W. Payne, Jr., Stevens patiently explained that the poem dealt with sense experiences or "sensations" (Letters, 251).

2] Haddam: a town in Connecticut whose men may have dug once for gold but whose distinctively "Yankee"-sounding name accounted for its use here (Letters, 251, 786).

3] bawds of euphony: evidently, literary critics, those who make money off other men's enjoyment of harmony (Letters, 340).

Wallace Stevens was born October 2, 1879, in Reading, Pennysylvania, and was educated in classics at Reading Boys' High School and at Harvard as a special student 1897-1900. There he acted as President of the Harvard Advocate and published some verse. After several years as a reporter in New York, Stevens entered New York Law School in 1901 and eventually clerked for W. G. Peckham, a New York attorney. Stevens was admitted to the bar in 1904. In New York he worked for several law firms and then joined an insurance firm, the American Bonding Company of Baltimore, which became the Equitable Surety Company of St. Louis. Stevens and Elsie Viola Kachel married in 1909 and lived in New York until they moved to Hartford, Connecticut, in 1916. Until his retirement, he worked for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, moving up to Vice President in 1934. His poem "Pecksniffiana" won the Helen Haire Levinson Prize offered by Poetry in 1920. In his lifetime he brought out the following books of poetry:

Harmonium (New York: A. A. Knopf, September 7, 1923) York University Special Collections 734
Ideas of Order (Alcestis Press, August 12, 1935; A. A. Knopf, October 19, 1936)
Owl's Clover (Alcestis Press, November 5, 1936)
The Man with the Blue Guitar (New York: A. A. Knopf, October 4, 1937)
Parts of a World (New York: A. A. Knopf, September 8, 1942)
Notes toward a Supreme Fiction (Cummington Press, October 13, 1942)
Esthétique du Mal (Cummington Press, November 6, 1945)
Transport to Summer (New York: A. A. Knopf, March 20, 1947)
The Auroras of Autumn (New York: A. A. Knopf, September 11, 1950)
Selected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, February 6, 1953)
Collected Poems (New York: A. A. Knopf, October 1, 1954)

Only after World War II was Stevens recognized as a major poet. His awards and honours include membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1946), the Bollingen Prize for 1949, the Poetry Society of America Gold Medal (1951), the National Book Award in Poetry (1950, 1954), and the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry (1955). He read and lectured often at universities and published one book of literary criticism, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (A. A. Knopf, November 12, 1951). Stevens died August 2, 1955, of stomach cancer, leaving one daughter, Holly Bright Stevens, who edited his letters afterwards. His wife Elsie Stevens died February 19, 1963. They are buried together at Cedar Hill Cemetery in Hartford.

* * *

The three Walllace Stevens texts below (Opus Posthumous, pp. 88, 111 and 115) point to approaches to haiku in relation to the Earth—realities:

THIS AS INCLUDING THAT

It is true that you live on this rock
And in it. It is wholly you.

It is true that there are thoughts
That move in the air as large as air,

That are almost not our own, but thoughts
To which we are related,

In an association like yours
With the rock and mine with you.

SOLITAIRE UNDER THE OAKS

In the oblivion of cards
One exists among pure principles.

Neither the cards nor the trees nor the air
Persist as facts. This is an escape

To principium, to meditation.
One knows at last what to think about

And thinks about it without consciousness,
Under the oak tree, completely released.

TWO LETTERS

In a secrecy of words
Opened out within a secrecy of place,

Not having to do with love.
A land would hold her in its arms that day

Or something like a land.
The circle would no longer be broken but closed.

The miles of its distance away
From everything would end. It would all meet.