Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird: Key Poetic Devices

Allusion

An allusion (uh-LOO-zhun) is a passing reference to a literary or historical person, place, or event, usually made without explicit identification. Stevens uses this literary technique in stanza VII (lines 25–29), where he references a place called “Haddam”:

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?

The speaker makes a direct address to the “thin men of Haddam.” These men have evidently preferred to imagine themselves surrounded by fanciful “golden birds” rather than recognize the blackbirds in their midst. In other words, the speaker critiques a community that privileges fantasy over reality. The failure of these “thin men” to engage with reality indicates a perceptual lack that perhaps mirrors a deeper spiritual poverty indicated by their thinness. But who are these “thin men of Haddam”? Haddam is a small town in Connecticut about thirty miles away from Hartford, where Stevens lived from 1915 until his death in 1955. By alluding to this town, Stevens indicates his own proximity to the thin men and their perceptual and spiritual paucity. Intriguingly, “Haddam” sounds close to “Adam,” the biblical progenitor of the human race, controversially suggesting that this figure was similarly imperceptive and spiritually poor. Stevens underscores this sly allusion with the biblical language of the stanza’s opening line: “O thin men of Haddam.”

Juxtaposition

When used in the context of literary analysis, juxtaposition refers to instances where two ideas, concepts, or images are placed next to each other to highlight the contrast between them. Stevens uses juxtaposition to powerful effect in “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” primarily through the way he constructs the poem from a series of distinct vignettes. Each stanza in the poem is numbered with a Roman numeral, but these numerals don’t indicate a linear form that proceeds continuously from one stanza to the next. Instead, the numerals count the “thirteen ways” mentioned in the title. Despite specifically being “ways of a looking at a blackbird,” each stanza is self-contained and characterized by its own distinct imagery, tone, and diction. For the reader’s part, moving from one stanza to the next may be somewhat jarring because of the lack of evident continuity. We may feel like we are reading a collection of shorter poems rather than one longer one. However, the sense of discontinuity that arises from the juxtaposition of individual stanzas is crucial for the larger poem’s overall effect. The accumulation of distinct, fragmented visions creates a kaleidoscopic effect that reflects the poem’s investigation of different ways of perceiving—and misperceiving—the world.

Parallelism

Parallelism is a rhetorical technique that coordinates separate ideas through the repetition of similar wording or phrasing. The mere repetition of words and phrases can produce any number of effects. By contrast, parallelism specifically helps to bring a sense of order and balance to the arrangement of ideas. For one example, consider stanza V (lines 13–17):

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

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. The first pair of alternatives consists of “the beauty of inflections” and “the beauty of innuendoes.” The second pair consists of “the blackbird whistling” and “just after [the blackbird whistling].” These two pairs of alternatives map on to one another, much like in a formal analogy. In fact, we could restate the final four lines of this stanza as an analogy:

“beauty of inflections” : “blackbird whistling” :: “the beauty of innuendoes” : “just after”

The speaker doesn’t ultimately define their preference, choosing instead to keep their options open. In this way, the use of parallel structure in this stanza sets up a pleasing effect of tension that further develops the poem’s theme about the plural nature of possibility.

Simile

A simile (SIH-muh-LEE) is a figure of speech that explicitly compares two unlike things to each other, usually with a connecting word such as “like” or “as.” “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” features one prominent example of simile, which appears in stanza II (lines 4–6):

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

This entire stanza is structured as a simile, with the two things being compared appearing in the first and third lines, and the middle line offering the word (“like”) that brings the comparison together. The simile articulated in this short stanza is significant for the way it echoes one of the larger poem’s central themes: that is, the plurality of perspectives. Perhaps the first thing to notice is that the speaker of this stanza introduces a surprising equivalence between themself as an individual and a trio of birds. In saying that they are “of three minds,” the speaker indicates that they don’t consider themself a singular being. Instead, they possess within themself a multiplicity of different perspectives that cannot be reduced any further. Just like the tree with three blackbirds in it, the speaker is not singular but plural.

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