orce of sexual expression, which renews life via unity with the Other.
Even so, "Blackbird" does not rest in the reflection of how wonderful life and nature are. There is throughout the poem a vague uneasiness; the irregular stanza scheme and almost accidental rhyme pattern contribute to that sense. Equally, the fact that the narrative is set in wintry, blustery, cold weather warns the reader not to get too comfortable with this poem and mistakenly interpret it as a nice little meditation on nature. There is a deliberateness about the text that positions the blackbird as more or less a menacing force. Thus, one can take the three blackbirds sit perched in the tree in II as three witches, three Fates, or three disasters (which in popular imagination always seem to arrive in threes). Of the lot of stanzas, the single most pleasant and hopeful one is V, in which there is a brief appreciation of beauty. Even so, the poet expresses confusion about "which to prefer, / The beauty of inflections / Or the beauty of innuendoes, / The blackbird whistling / Or just after." The first beauty suggests one of immediate, perhaps nuanced, experience and the latter one of implication, although what is implied by a word generally expressed in a negative sense can only be guessed at. The sound of the blackbird that is referred to resembles nothing so much as Poe's raven's famously ominous "Nevermore." In VI, the text is more directly narrative and the mood of the poet turns even more ominous, a sense captured by reference to the icicles on the window (of life?) and "barbaric glass." By this point, the world that the blackbird inhabits has a sinister, difficult to interpret character. It is in VI, too, that the "shadow of the blackbird" appears, as if the poet is deliberately dodging the opportunity to explain his own meaning by evoking the blackbird's shadow as a mood and a cause "indecipherable."
The poet proceeds to embrace the ungov...