Does the poem seem an arbitrary combination of thirteen separate ...

[tnt_battle]

Does the poem seem an arbitrary combination of thirteen separate poems?Or is there any reason to call it a whole?
 
  What will be an ideal response?

Question 2

If the thirteen parts were arranged in some different order, would the poembe just as good? Or can you find a justification for its beginning with Part I and ending with Part XIII?
 
  What will be an ideal response?

[cadimas]

Answer to Question 1

• As indicated above, Stevens himself thought of Thirteen Ways as a group of separate poems, while the great majority of readers and critics have come down strongly on the opposite side of the issue. It is unlikely, however, that Stevens would accept the description arbitrary combination, since he stated that they were meant to be a collection . . . of sensations. In the end, calling it a single poem or a sequence of poems may be largely a matter of semantics. But what is beyond dispute is that its disparate parts are united by their individual treatments of a single, overarching theme, the principal theme of Stevenss entire body of poetrythe relationship between the natural, external world and our subjective perceptions of and relationship to it.

Answer to Question 2

• As for the first of these questions, either side of the issue might be argued with equal plausibility: the argument could be made (and no doubt someone, somewhere, has made it) that it is optimal, even necessary, that the poems sections occur in the order in which they do; one could just as conceivably maintain that at least some of the cards could be shuffled without any significant compromise of the poems larger intentions. Regarding the second question, a convincing justification is offered by the previously cited Richard Allen Blessing:

The dynamic character of the blackbird as symbol is nowhere more apparent than in a comparison of stanzas I and XIII, stanzas which function like bookends to hold the poem together. . . . The final stanza repeats the same motifs as the firstthe solitary and silent blackbird against the equally silent emptiness of white snow. The stanzas are similar enough to be thought of as versions of a single scene. . . .
The poem opens with a blackbird which suggests a living presence at the center of a snowy waste land and ends with the same bird as a sinister, death-like presence in the midst of a universe of flux. (Blessing, 2627)
Blessings seven-page discussion of the poem is a more detailed and thoughtful treatment of this poem than one customarily encounters, and is well worth reading in its entirety.