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Because “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” consists of thirteen standalone stanzas, the poem as a whole doesn’t have a single specific setting. Instead, each stanza has its own setting. Some stanzas have a more concrete setting than others. For instance, the opening lines of stanza XI specifically locate the scene in the eastern United States: “He rode over Connecticut / In a glass coach” (lines 42–43). Stanza VII is even more precisely located within Connecticut through its reference to “Haddam” (line 25), which is a town just thirty miles away from Stevens’s own home in Hartford. Other stanzas in the poem contain references to time or place that are less specific, and they focus instead on generic landscapes. This is the case for stanza I (lines 1–3):

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

Stanzas III and XII take place in similarly generic locations. Yet other stanzas are set in more intimate but equally nonspecific places, such as the indoor space inferred at the beginning of stanza VI: “Icicles filled the long window / With barbaric glass” (lines 18–19). Overall, the poem’s thirteen stanzas feature settings of vastly different scales and degrees of concrete specificity. This range reflects the poem’s broader interest in plural ways of perceiving the world.

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