The only moving thing / Was the eye of the blackbird.
This striking image establishes the blackbird as the dominant image of the poem, and propels the reader into the cinematic experience of "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." The line break, and the delay of the blackbird until the very end, creates suspense as our reading eye is swept into the motion of seeking the one black pinpoint of motion. The bird's eye greets our own as we begin, reminding us that this poem is all about seeing and perspective. The eye is the "moving thing" in that it has physical motion, and also in that it is emotionally moving: potential foreshadowing for the vast range of emotions that the blackbird will produce over the course of the poem.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
The blackbird is only a tiny part of nature; and yet what makes it so significant in this poem is our attentive focus on it. "Pantomime" suggests that nature is dramatic, even theatrical, yet wordless in that we cannot always explain it literally. The blackbird's humble role suggests, encouragingly, that any such tiny creature or detail in nature might offer us a wealth of beauty and insight if we take the time to look.
The blackbird whistling / Or just after.
The central duality of section V is the beauty of music versus that of suggestive silence. It is harmless, even beautiful, not to know which form of beauty to prefer, and to acknowledge as the poem does that we can study and enjoy nature from a variety of different perspectives.
Icicles filled the long window / With barbaric glass.
In contrast with the previous section, this couplet sets a tone of fright and danger. The icicles and the savage glass seem to be one and the same, all knife-like points that threaten our viewing eye. The glass is significant as a metaphor for the act of looking itself: when the window or perspective through which we see the world is clouded, we feel uncertain and threatened.
The mood / Traced in the shadow / An indecipherable cause.
As the end of section VI, this very cryptic and abstract sentence describes the uncomfortable feeling of uncertainty. The viewer cannot discern the "cause" of the blackbird—cannot assign a symbolic meaning to it—and our sense of knowledge is shaken. The intangible "mood" of danger creates a 'trace' or outline in the "shadow," which is already an outline of something unseen and "indecipherable." These layers of obscurity remind us that even our best efforts to look into nature, or life, sometimes fail to give us anything clearer than the trace of a shadow of its meaning.
O thin men of Haddam, / Why do you imagine golden birds?
This is the only section of the poem directly addressed to another person or group of people, the "thin men of Haddam." It is fair to say that Stevens, or the speaker of this poem, wants other poets and readers to join him in his examination of the lowly, commonplace creatures in nature, because there is so much untapped potential for poetry to be written about them. The speaker is frustrated by hopeful writers who waste their time imagining idealized, beautiful images that do not exist, and thus cannot lend their poems an edge of real truth. Instead, he wants them to turn their gaze to the real things around them.
I know, too, / That the blackbird is involved / In what I know.
Here, the speaker openly acknowledges the subliminal role that the blackbird has had everywhere in the poem. The beauty, fear, or uncertainty represented by the enigmatic blackbird are always present in our lives. Furthermore, the speaker accepts that part of what he "knows" includes aspects of nature, and instinct, that he might be unable to fully rationalize or explain: hence why we are not told how the blackbird is involved, only that it is. Making peace with this ambiguity helps us to be humble about our poetic craft and logic, with which we try to organize nature according to human rules; it also mitigates the fear present in the uncertainty when we cannot understand nature.
It marked the edge / Of one of many circles.
This highly abstract stanza creates the image of our field of vision as a circle with a finite edge. The implication of this idea is that there are an infinite number of such circles, as there are an infinity of possible human perspectives on a thing like a blackbird. The edge also delineates the boundary between the known and the unknown, which will shift depending on where we stand; but regardless, we will never be able to see all of existence at once.
The river is moving. / The blackbird must be flying.
If this stanza sounds like an old adage, we should be attentive to how it makes us think. The tone of the lines encourages us to accept this conclusion as fact, but can we really presume to predict what the blackbird will be doing at any given time? Each stanza so far has shown it in a new way, leaving us no single truth about the blackbird. We are tempted to accept this image of spring, of forward motion, but should remember to question how we have this knowledge of the blackbird, and how much it depends on our perspective in observing it.
It was evening all afternoon. / It was snowing / And it was going to snow.
The first line, which seems like a paradox at first, deftly depicts a winter day that gets dark early. This is a familiar kind of inevitability, with the snow falling, when one knows that a long snowy night is coming and hunkers down indoors in anticipation of it. This feeling of anticipation and inevitability leads us to the final interpretive choice of the poem: are we comforted by the winter night, or does it bring despair and worry? This will determine how we see the blackbird in the final stanza.
