Who Are The Main Characters In Thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Blackbird?

2026-01-07 22:46:38 132

3 Answers

Nora
Nora
2026-01-11 16:47:37
Stevens' blackbird poem feels like overhearing snippets of strangers' lives at a bus stop—fleeting and intimate at once. There's no conventional cast, but certain presences linger: the bird as both creature and metaphor, the 'snowy mountains' watching impassively in stanza VI, even the 'barbaric glass' in stanza IX that distorts reality. What sticks with me are the implied human reactions—the awe in stanza I ('Among twenty snowy mountains, / The only moving thing / Was the eye of the blackbird'), the melancholy in stanza IV ('A man and a woman / Are one. / A man and a woman and a blackbird / Are one'). It's like catching glances of yourself in broken mirrors. Last winter, I saw a crow perched on a fire escape and instinctively thought, 'That's stanza V's blackbird, marking the edge / Of one of many circles.' The poem colonized my way of seeing—its 'characters' are whatever you bring to them.
Violet
Violet
2026-01-12 13:01:25
If you forced me to name 'characters' in this poem, I'd say the blackbird is the constant—a feathered MacGuffin that morphs from symbol to symbol. But the humans are fascinating ghosts in the margins! Like the 'thin men of Haddam' in stanza VII, probably townsfolk reduced to poetic ciphers, or the 'bawds of euphony' in stanza X who might represent hollow artists. Stevens throws us these cryptic figures like breadcrumbs. My literature professor once argued the true protagonist is the reader, piecing together these disjointed visions into something personal.

The poem's genius lies in what it omits. Who's the 'I' in stanza XIII who 'was of three minds, like a tree in which there are three blackbirds'? Is it Stevens? Everyman? The ambiguity makes it pulse with life. I've scribbled so many margin theories about the shadowy figures implied by lines like 'the river is moving / the blackbird must be flying'—their absence weighs heavier than most fully drawn characters I've encountered.
Liam
Liam
2026-01-13 05:42:38
Wallace Stevens' 'Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird' isn't a traditional narrative with clear protagonists—it's a modernist poem where perspective shifts like light through a prism. The 'characters' are really fragmented observations: the blackbird itself, of course, but also the unnamed observers in each stanza. My favorite is the moody third stanza, where the blackbird 'whirled in the autumn winds' alongside an implied speaker who feels equally untethered. It's less about individuals and more about how consciousness interacts with nature. Sometimes I imagine the poem as thirteen different people glimpsing the same bird on a single day, each moment colored by their private worlds.

What grips me is how Stevens turns the blackbird into a Rorschach test—it becomes fear, beauty, indifference, depending on who's looking. There's that haunting eleventh stanza where 'he rode over Connecticut in a glass coach,' blending fairy-tale imagery with existential dread. The real 'main character' might be perception itself, how reality fractures when filtered through human eyes. I keep revisiting this poem because each read feels like meeting new versions of myself reacting to that elusive bird.
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