Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird VII
O thin men of Haddam,Why do you imagine golden birds?Do you not see how the blackbirdWalks around the feetOf the women about you?
About this text
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird VII is in the public domain. This text is taken from Harmonium, Project Gutenberg ebook #78743; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird VII, in Harmonium (1923), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #78743, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/stevens-harmonium/thirteen-ways-of-looking-at-a-blackbird-vii.html, id L01080.
Form and metre
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird VII is 5 lines in a single stanza. The lines average 7.0 syllables. 1 line ends on an unstressed syllable, a feminine ending.
Measured by Laurel's pipeline, not copied from a handbook: how stress and metre are counted, how rhyme is lettered, how a drifted rhyme is found. Where the dictionary cannot confirm a rhyme the letter is withheld, not guessed.
Scansion, line by line
Each line with its syllable count and the stresses the words themselves fix: / stressed, ˘ unstressed, · a syllable the word leaves free and the metre decides. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| O thin men of Haddam, | 6 | ······ |
| Why do you imagine golden birds? | 9 | ···˘/˘/˘· |
| Do you not see how the blackbird | 8 | ······/˘ |
| Walks around the feet | 5 | ····· |
| Of the women about you? | 7 | ··/˘··· |
The reader shows the same poem with its rhymes coloured and a stress row above each line, the notes beside their stanzas, and any word's definition on a tap; the analysis page takes the whole book apart. How every part of this site was made.