V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
VI
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.
Summary
In the fifth section, the speaker muses on the blackbird's whistling, and cannot decide which is more beautiful: the whistle, or the profound and suggestive silence immediately afterwards.
In the sixth section, an icy window is a frightening image. A blackbird flies unseen, and its shadow flits back and forth across the window, creating a general mood of uncertainty and uneasiness.
Analysis: V
This stanza directly questions the nature of beauty by juxtaposing what I will call explicit and implicit beauty: the musical whistling of the blackbird, or the thought-provoking, less tangible beauty of the silence afterwards. This contrast continues the poem's consistent technique in each section of creating a minimal pair of two related parts. The question itself is beautiful in its presentation: both options are attractive, and the repetition of the word "beauty" emphasizes their equal merit. The syntax beautifully balances the two options: as "inflections" and "innuendoes" in lines two and three of the stanza, and then their respective explanations in lines four and five. The minimalism of the final line, "Or just after," captures something of the ineffable appeal of the silence right after a sound has ended.
As with every aspect of the poem, this stanza does not give an answer to its own question. The indecision is harmless, even delightful. Nature, like the blackbird as a symbol across this poem, offers a multitude of ways to understand it and find it beautiful. The explicit and implicit beauty of the blackbird's whistle are two different "Ways of Looking," or in this case ways of listening. This section echoes a passage from John Keats' famous "Ode on a Grecian Urn"—"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter"—for Keats the Romantic poet, the most potent beauty was always that which is implied, able to be felt but not expressed. Picking a side would have been easy for Keats, but Stevens defies antique poetic conventions by claiming that all perspectives, all types of beauty, are valid: what is important is that we embrace the range of perspectives with an open mind. Section V remains highly relevant to sections VII and X, in which Stevens criticizes those who do choose one form of beauty to "prefer." The wise poet, for Stevens, is the one who is able to appreciate all forms of beauty, including its absence, no matter how mundane. Indeed, this much is already clear from the choice of the blackbird as the creature of focus.
Analysis: VI
Both sections V and VI make the blackbird a symbol of ambiguity: in stanza V, this uncertainty is charming and beautiful, but in stanza VI it is threatening. By now, the poem has settled fully into its process of looking, revising its perspective, and looking again. In section VI, this act of looking is thrown into doubt when it fails to yield a meaning. The "window" is significant as an object through which we should be able to see, but which is clouded here by ice. The window is "long" in the way that life is long, but it might nevertheless be narrow, allowing us to look for a while without a definitive answer. It is not "wide," which would give the far different connotation of an open, expansive view. In an odd phrasing, the icicles "fill" the window with "barbaric glass"—but since the window is already made of glass, the implication is that the icicles make the glass barbaric, or that the icicles are themselves the "barbaric glass." Thus the icicles, in their cold sharpness, take on the qualities of jagged shards of glass, like knives threatening the viewer.
Consistent with this obscured visibility, the blackbird here only appears as a shadow. It has no fixed position as it crosses "to and fro." The "mood" of this scene results in our inability to interpret the meaning behind the blackbird, the "indecipherable cause" in the last line. This stanza and its icy window represent the failure of the interpretive eye, a way of looking that yields only uncertainty. It acts perhaps to unsettle the reader and remind us that there will always be things in nature to which we cannot assign an easy symbolic meaning, and which we cannot rationalize in a human scheme of organization. We can make sense of the blackbird by placing it within systems of thought, as in sections II and IV, but the underlying "cause," which we might interpret as broadly as the scientific or spiritual reason for the blackbird's existence, will likely still evade us. The poem does not fully make peace with this unsettling uncertainty here, but will come closer in later sections when it revisits the limits of what we can interpret and know.
