Trail Days - the Wallace Stevens Walk 6/4/2011

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) lived and worked in Hartford where he became one of America's foremost poets of the 20th century. He was vice president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co., and remained in that executive position until his death.

The Wallace Stevens Walk includes thirteen Connecticut granite sculptural markers which trace the poets route to and from work each day. Each marker is etched with a verse of the Stevens' poem.

The Hartford (as the insurance company is now called) was the beginning of the walk.

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

I was of three minds,
Like a tree,
In which there are three blackbirds.

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


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


I do not know which to prefer
The beauty of inflection
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The black bird whistling
or just after.


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.


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?


I know noble accents
And lucid inescapable rhythms:
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.


Walking along Asylum Ave to the next marker.


When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.


At the sight of blackbirds,
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

A welcome lemonade break.


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



The river is moving.
The blackbirds must be flying.


It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbirds sat
In the cedar-limbs.

The walk ended across from his house on Westerly Terrace.