I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
Summary
The first section sets up a striking natural scene in which the vast, motionless expanse of a white mountain range is contrasted with the tiny, moving eye of the blackbird.
The second section departs from the landscape of section I to depict a mental landscape, in which the speaker's undecided mind is compared to a tree containing three blackbirds. The speaker is "of three minds," which are compared to "three blackbirds," so that the blackbirds come to represent the various possible decisions or feelings.
Analysis: I
As the first of the "Thirteen Ways of Looking," this tercet has a lot of introductory work to do. It packs a remarkable amount of motion, on the part of the observer, into three lines: like a camera, we zoom in from an enormous panorama to a minuscule focal point, from the unmoving immensity of landscape to the animated specificity of animal life. A number of binaries are at work here: large vs. small, "twenty" vs. "only," still vs. moving, inanimate vs. animate, white vs. black. The ordinary blackbird becomes, subtly, a figure of awesome power: as a visual image, the one tiny bird holds its own against twenty enormous mountains. It also stands out as a spot of rich darkness in the white landscape, setting the precedent of the blackbird as a commanding visual presence going forward.
The framing of this first stanza also encourages us, as readers or poetic observers, to identify with the eye of the blackbird—or the "I" of the blackbird, if we indulge the homophone. This makes it especially appropriate that it is section "I" — the eye of the blackbird is our entry into the poem, our first "way of looking," and it is significant that the first living thing to greet us is an eye, staring right back. This image focuses our gaze reflexively on our own act of looking, and should encourage us to consider how we are seeing each image that the poem presents to us, and what new perspective we take on in each section. The fact that we identify with the blackbird also mitigates the usual connotations of the dark bird as death: instead, the blackbird is our lifeline into the scene being depicted.
The syntax and order of the three lines also heightens the suspense in our reading: "the eye of the blackbird" is the last phrase, the last thing our gaze lands on. As the ends of lines one and three, "mountains" and "blackbird" are balanced as the contrasting pair. During the transition, line two, we are caught for the brief span of one line in the suspense of wondering: what is "the only moving thing"? For that brief pause, our mind's eye imitates the cinematic act of roaming the mountain vista, searching for this one spot of motion. In a way, this first section acts as a training regimen for the reader's eye, getting us ready for the next twelve "ways of looking." The shift between images in section I is perhaps the most dramatic ocular exercise in the whole poem, but should remind us not to let our guard down, as observers, as we read the rest of the poem.
Analysis: II
This stanza introduces the first-person speaker, "I." If we link this section back to the first, where we identified ourselves with "the eye of the blackbird," then this "I" may still be the personification of our reading consciousness as it begins to traverse the "Thirteen Ways of Looking." With this identity, the indecision—"I was of three minds"—is at least in part a moment of hesitation as to how to proceed: from what perspective will we look at the blackbird next?
This section partly answers this question by giving us our second of thirteen blackbird images. The speaker could be any person whose mind is conflicted, and the poem is saying something about the process of decision-making itself. When we are in this state, the realm of mental possibility diverges into several forms—but perhaps the most crucial detail here is that the "three blackbirds" all appear the same. The speaker's mind is not "apples and oranges," but "three blackbirds"—indicating, perhaps, that the three possible choices are not actually all that different from one another. Or perhaps that no matter the choice, the 'blackbird' will remain as a constant across all outcomes—the blackbird here being our link to nature, our visual focus, one of many possible symbols. Significant, too, is the phrase "three minds," not "one mind that is undecided," which in the context of the whole poem may embrace the multiplicity of perspectives that the speaker inhabits, or even taking it a step further to say, not only does each person have their own unique perspective on a situation, but even within one person there can be multiple perspectives. Consistently, Stevens encourages us to look, readjust our perspectives, look, readjust again.
Syntactically, this stanza repeats the shape of stanza one, with slight alterations. Like "mountains" and "blackbird" in section I, "three minds" and "three blackbirds" here are balanced at the ends of lines one and three to form a pair, but this time are poised in equivalence, not contrast. Twenty and one become three and three: the speaker has organized the blackbird within a mental landscape. The two lines are anchored by the short middle line and its tree, whose roots and trunk we can imagine as grounding the more abstract images of the mind-blackbirds. Similarity and subtle differences are an important undercurrent in this stanza, not just among the three minds / blackbirds, but among the words "three," "tree," and "there." The three lines complete a mini-circle in which, by slight changes in spelling, "three" becomes "tree" becomes "there," and back to "three" again—raising the question of whether these tiny changes represent the evolution from "minds" to "blackbirds," or whether they have no net motion at all, and return to where they started. This stanza's central images are at once the same and subtly different in ways we cannot quite pinpoint, encouraging us to keep investigating minuscule differences as the poem goes on.
