I used Wallace Steven’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” as a model for an imitative poem. I focused on the way in which Stevens used different aspects of an objective image to present a subjective understanding of it in order to guide the development of my corresponding poem. In the same way that Stevens emphasized not the image itself but the ways in which his subject apprehended and examined the image (or object), I tried to write a poem using the idea of silence to, as Eliot would say, bring together, under its name, elements which have nothing in particular to do with silence itself and thus focus on the symbol to be formed from it rather than the image to be observed in it.
“Six Ways of Listening to Silence”
I.
The lake water stilled
with the quieting wind.
II.
The density of the silence
diffused
for the entry of a thunderclap.
III.
The wind between the trees sounded
as a symphony
of undulating silences.
IV.
Always there is
a certain silence contained within a din of motion
and a subtle roar pervading the implicit din of stillness;
And I wonder if the world was conceived
from quietude or sonancy.
V.
I thought I heard contained
in the mob’s collective chant
the same singular silence felt upon a midnight lake.
VI.
I saw the face of the midnight moon
reflected in the quiet stillness of the lake.
Excellent imitation. I like how you work with a sense of scale not in terms of size (blackbird’s eye, twenty mountains) but on the sense of felt sound and / as silence (silence in a mob / in a midnight lake, and also the sounding of silence in general, or the silence of sounding (thunderclap). It gives one the same sense of movement. I also like how the poem clearly moves into more abstract meditations before concluding, as Stevens’s poem does, on a more concrete imagistic note.