Relationships in Nature
Everything in "Thirteen Ways" is connected via blackbirds. This is an obvious fact, but the blackbird is not necessarily a common symbol to choose: why base a poem around a fairly ordinary bird? A common Stevens theme is that we as humans choose what symbolic meaning to assign to everything in nature: so, too, does the blackbird gains significance simply because Stevens chose it. The poem demonstrates that its disparate scenes, the people and the landscapes, all have something in common if we look at the right point of connection: in this case, the blackbird.
The recurring blackbird comes to represent the subliminal background presence that nature always has in our lives. The mantra-like repetition of the distinctive word "blackbird" in every stanza contributes to this sense of a constant background presence. Nature is there when we ponder a decision (II), when a couple comes together (IV), when we fantasize (VII), when we travel (XI) and more. Though the stanzas present a wide diversity of thought and emotion, the blackbird stitches together a tenuous connection to join them all in a common relationship. We are all, then, "a small part of the pantomime." This is perhaps the most optimistic interpretation of the poem: a holistic sense of togetherness within nature.
Beauty and Awe
This poem constantly questions the nature of beauty—fittingly, for a poem about a bird that poets have often overlooked in favor of more classically "beautiful" animal muses. Some of the beauty of the poem itself comes from its unadorned, stark imagery: for example, the cinematic drama in section I of the minuscule black eye moving amid the vast, stationary white landscape. Just as there are many ways of "looking at a blackbird," the poem suggests there are just as many ways of finding it beautiful (or not), without forcing us to choose one type of beauty. This is most directly addressed in section V: the beauty of inflections and innuendoes—of lyrical song and meditative silence—are presented as equal and opposite possibilities. We are not told "which to prefer."
However, the poem does unequivocally chastise people who seek superficial or idealized forms of beauty while ignoring the complex wonders in front of them. The "thin men of Haddam" in section VII—the unrealistic dreamer poets—are chastised for their preference of imaginary beauty over real. Likewise, the "bawds of euphony" (X)—the dealers of superficially pretty verse—are shocked into a more profound state of awe by the plain sight of blackbirds. The poem's speaker acknowledges in VII that he knows the types of language and speech deemed beautiful by human conventions, but also acknowledges a deeper raw aesthetic value in nature, signified by the blackbird.
Order and Chaos
Another common Stevens theme is that the human mind imposes order on the chaos of nature, though neither state is inherently better. The thirteen concise stanzas of this poem are deceptively orderly; however, the human-centric systems of organization into which the blackbird is forced are transparently arbitrary. Examples of this type of imaginary order imposed on nature are the speaker's mental blackbird tree (II), the surprising trinity of man, woman, and blackbird (IV), the flight circle that is one of an infinite number of circles (IX), and the questionable deduction in section XII. This is not to say these inventions are meaningless, but simply for the poem to demonstrate that they are inventions of the human mind.
Human perspective
Hidden in plain sight in the poem's title, "Ways of Looking" points to one of the poem's major themes. Each stanza is a different perspective, despite several sharing the same first-person speaker. Each section shifts the poetic lens and gives one new version of the blackbird after another, so that over the course of the poem, the bird comes to represent beauty and fear, harmony and chaos, indecision and certainty. The variety of these "ways of looking" leads some critics to name this poem, among many others by Stevens, as an example of perspectivism, a Nietzschean philosophy that all meaning and truth is determined by each person's subjective viewpoint. This poem rigorously urges readers to adjust and readjust our viewpoints to embrace this multiplicity of perspectives.
Knowledge and its Limitations
Closely related to the themes of order versus chaos and human perspective, the poem investigates how and why we can know certain things about the blackbird, or about nature. At times, the poem's speaker is at peace with ambivalence, with the fact that he cannot absolutely know everything about nature (V). He recognizes that within his own knowledge of language and poetics, there are forces of nature involved that might be beyond his understanding (VIII). Still, the blackbird is threatening and dangerous when it represents the unknown (XI) or when it is "indecipherable" to a human observer (VI). Section VI presents a "barbaric" image in which human knowledge is brought to its limits, where the blackbird is only an intangible "shadow," and what it represents is unclear. In section XII, the speaker tests the limits of logic and reasoning by presenting a strange logical leap as a declaration. Perhaps the most appropriate image for these limitations is section IX: when the blackbird flies "out of sight," it leaves our perception. The circle it traces—our limited area of knowledge—is only one of an infinite number of intelligible circles of reason, of understanding, or of meaning.
Death
A somewhat alternative critical interpretation to that offered in most of this guide is that of the blackbird as a symbol of death. This significance largely comes out of the poetic tradition of black birds, such as ravens and crows, as deathly omens—as in Poe's "The Raven"—and, if we indulge it, adds a haunting layer to the poem's other themes. If the blackbird represents the constant, unifying presence of nature, death is also part of nature, and thus also ever-present. This helps explain why uncertainty renders it terrifying: if the speaker sees the shadow of death in the window in section VI, or the man in XI sees the threat of death racing alongside his coach. In the final stanza, the blackbird can represent either the tranquility of snowfall or a watchful reminder of the inevitability of death, the impending sunset implied by "It was evening all afternoon." Of course, it is always possible for the poem to mean all these things at once, for death to exist in balance alongside unity.
