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As suggested by the poem’s title, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” consists of thirteen individual stanzas that are numbered with Roman numerals. Though the stanzas are numbered sequentially, they do not present a linear narrative or argument. Instead, each stanza offers as a distinct, standalone vignette. One vignette doesn’t follow from or develop in the previous one in a logically linear way, but the stanzas do nonetheless accumulate to produce a kind of composite image. That said, it’s important to emphasize that this composite image doesn’t resolve into something singular. Rather, the poem’s thirteen stanzas produce an effect that we could liken to a collage, or perhaps to a kaleidoscope. A kaleidoscope is a tube that’s outfitted with mirrors. The mirrors break a single image into many fragments, which arrange themselves into shifting patterns as the user rotates the tube. Similarly, Stevens’s poem reveals a multiplicity of fragmented “ways of looking at a blackbird.” These distinct “ways” never merge into a single image. However, these ways of looking do introduce a range of thematic patterns that, like a kaleidoscope, shift depending on how the reader approaches the poem.

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