I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

The first stanza in the poem (lines 1–3) presents an image of a blackbird in a snowy landscape. Specifically, the speaker isolates a precisely detailed figure (“the eye of the blackbird”) against a vast background (“twenty snowy mountains”). On the one hand, the apparent simplicity of this image recalls the serene minimalism of a Japanese haiku as well as the radical reduction involved in Imagist poetry of the mid-1910s. On the other hand, the image presented in this stanza presents a contrast between figure and ground in a way that evokes early twentieth-century psychological theories about perception. According to these theories, perception is made possible by an organizing principle of the mind that functions by distinguishing an object from its context. It’s only by isolating figure from ground that we can perceive things as distinct entities. Stevens plays on this influential theory through his repeated use of images that offer different “ways of looking” based on the juxtaposition of figure and ground.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

In stanza V (lines 13–17), the speaker uses the song of the blackbird to help articulate a dilemma of aesthetic preference. The speaker unfolds this dilemma through a rhetorical technique known as parallelism, which coordinates separate ideas through the repetition of similar wording or phrasing. The first line of this passage sets the stage for the parallel structure that follows, which establishes two pairs of alternatives the speaker might choose between. These two pairs of alternatives are coordinated, such that “the blackbird whistling” is linked to “the beauty of inflections.” Likewise, the moment “just after” the blackbird finishes whistling is linked to “the beauty of innuendoes.” Put more simply, the speaker can’t decide whether they prefer the kind of beauty the comes with direct presence, or the kind of beauty that arises in the melancholic absence of direct presence. The presence or absence of the blackbird’s whistle serves as a concrete example to help the speaker establish the terms of their dilemma about aesthetic preference.

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

In stanza VIII (lines 30–34), the speaker takes on a more esoteric tone to speculate about how what they know about the world is somehow connected to the blackbird. In contrast to many of the other stanzas in the poem, this one doesn’t offer a literal “way of looking” at a blackbird. Instead, the speaker of this stanza features the blackbird in a more symbolic way. It isn’t entirely clear what the speaker means when they declare, “I know, too, / That the blackbird is involved / In what I know.” Perhaps the speaker has spent a lot of time closely observing blackbirds, such that whatever they’ve learned about “noble accents” and “inescapable rhythms” must somehow be connected to their observations. Alternatively, perhaps the blackbird has been more marginal to the speaker’s experience, but a chance meeting with a blackbird draws to mind a sudden awareness of cross-species connection. Since the speaker doesn’t give us any more information, we can’t really know. All we can say is that the speaker sees a profound connection between their knowledge and the blackbird, which conveys an awareness of interconnectedness.

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.

Stanza XI (lines 42–47) offers the poem’s quintessential example of misperception. Here, the speaker recounts the frightful experience of a man riding in a glass coach. He looked down at the ground, and when he saw the shadow cast by “his equipage” (i.e., his carriage), he “mistook” the dark spot on the ground “for blackbirds.” This act of misperception “pierced” the man with a “fear” that was real, even though the blackbirds he “saw” were a mere figment of his imagination. In this way, the stanza introduces a generative tension between reality and fantasy, where the imagination can have a very real effect on a person’s experience of the world. Yet it’s also important to note the ambiguity at play in this passage. When the speaker says the man “mistook / The shadow of his equipage / For blackbirds,” it isn’t clear whether he mistook the shadow on the ground for a flock of blackbirds, or if the shadow was somehow reflected by the glass carriage, creating a mirage where the shadow from the ground was projected above him. Either way, the ambiguity suggests a dizzying degree of disorientation that was bound up with the man’s misperception of the shadow.