A blackbird is a black bird, indeed...

J'aime le merle. Merles et merlettes dans mon jardin, le matin, le soir. Tu te souviens, ce beau merle dans le jardin de Iaisnaïa Poliana, Ясная Поляна, littéralement la clairière lumineuse, le domaine de Tolstoï au sud de Toula ? Noir sur vert sur champ de pivoines rouges.

J'ai cette vision en tête ce matin en revenant dans l'amphi A1 pour m'entretenir avec mes étudiants de Wallace Stevens. Je dis deux ou trois choses, et m'empresse de faire entendre ces treize façons de considérer un merle :

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

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

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

 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.

 V
 I do not know which to prefer,
 The beauty of inflections
 Or the beauty of innuendoes,
 The blackbird whistling
 Or just after.

 VI
 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.

 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 ?

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

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

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

 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.

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

Haïku du jour en prolongations épiphaniques.

Bye-bye Blackbird, see you soon.

(Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, Harmonium, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1923)