Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird: Motifs

Figure and Ground

Several stanzas in “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” feature the presentation of a blackbird against some sort of background. The opening stanza (lines 1–3) offers an excellent example of this kind of imagery:

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

Here, the speaker isolates a precisely detailed figure (“the eye of the blackbird”) against a vast background landscape (“twenty snowy mountains”). The poem ends with a similar juxtaposition of foreground and background (stanza XIII, lines 50–54):

It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

Once again, the speaker presents an isolated figure against a snowy background. These and other images in the poem use the juxtaposition of figure and ground to evoke 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.

Singular versus Plural

“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” is a poem that establishes a generative tension between the singular and the plural. This tension is already evident in the title, which contrasts the singular “blackbird” with “thirteen” different “ways of looking” at it. Several of the poem’s stanzas carry this tension further. In stanza II (lines 4–6), for instance, the speaker insists on the plural nature of their own point of view:

I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

The speaker disrupts the perhaps expected logic that would equate one person with one way of thinking or perceiving. Despite being singular, the speaker’s point of view is plural. Intriguingly, stanza IV (lines 9–12) presents a reversal of this idea:

A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

Once again the speaker defies traditional logic by claiming that that three apparently distinct entities—“a man and a woman and a blackbird”—are not in fact separate but rather “are one.” The same tension between singular and plural remains, but whereas in stanza II that tension tended toward the plural, here it tends toward the singular. This reversible tension opens a more general question about how many ways there are of experiencing both the self and the world.

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