The Tao of Wallace Stevens (13 Ways of Looking at …)

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

…

“The Tao is called the Great Mother: empty yet inexhaustible, it gives birth to infinite worlds. It is always present within you. You can use it any way you want.” (Tao Te Ching, verse 6) It is mysterious, yet we feel its presence, its ‘reality,’ in our most contemplative and most poetic moments.

In the West, we might call the Tao … Wallace Stevens called it the ‘blackbird.’

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http://knitandcontemplation.typepad.com/dao_wallace_stevens/2004/08/thirteen_ways_o.html

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 blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

…

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

…

Stanza 7
“O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?”

One of my favorites; ‘thin men of Haddam’ ie hungry for gain, ‘golden birds’ – the human tendency to desire riches, to find the expensive, the ‘fabulous’ as valuable. Stevens adjures them to find the wealth all around them in ordinary things. The ‘feet of the women,’ the feminine principle, is the true wealth.

Stanza 8
“I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.”

The tao is the source of his poetry.

– From:
The Dao of Wallace Stevens
an amateur – ‘one who loves’ – looks at the poetry of wallace stevens, from a background of the humanities, and daoist studies