Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird: Symbols

Blackbird

The blackbird stands as the poem’s central symbol, appearing as it does in each of the thirteen stanzas. But because the blackbird appears in a slightly different form each time, it isn’t immediately evident what this bird symbolizes. Arguably, the secret of the blackbird’s symbolism lies precisely in the variety of its appearances. That is, the blackbird symbolizes the sheer variety of ways of perceiving—and misperceiving—the world. This variety yields both appreciative and fearful responses to the world. For example, in stanza III (lines 7–8), the speaker showcases a serenely beautiful vision of the blackbird:

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

By contrast, in stanza XI (lines 42–47), the speaker recounts a man’s fearful response to the blackbird:

He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

Yet because the blackbird is the perceived rather than the perceiver, this creature doesn’t just symbolize the plurality of perception. The blackbird also symbolizes the very world that’s being perceived, and particularly the natural world. Just as the natural world is all around us all the time, the blackbird appears in every one of the poem’s thirteen stanzas. Symbolically, then, the blackbird is always present, regardless of whether humans are fully aware of it.

Shadows

The speaker’s multiple references to shadows symbolize the murky distinction between reality and perception. In stanza XI, for instance, the speaker recounts the experience of a man who “mistook / The shadow of his equipage / For blackbirds” (lines 45–47). There are no actual blackbirds present, yet this man still “sees” these birds in the shadow of his carriage and hence experiences a false reality. In stanza VI (lines 18–24), the speaker mentions shadows twice:

Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

The first shadow in this passage specifically references the physical shadow cast by a blackbird. The icicles that “filled the long window” already obscure sight and hence restrict vision to little more than light and shadow. The dark shadow of the blackbird that “crossed” the window is thus doubly obscured, doubly in shadow. The speaker emphasizes this more abstract sense of shadow in their second use of the word, which describes a “mood / Traced in the shadow / An indecipherable cause.” Here, the shadow has a psychological rather than a physical origin, and so results in a dark mood rather than a literal dark spot. Yet this mood doesn’t have a clear, discernible cause, which further blurs the distinction between what’s real and not.

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