The Bird With The Coppery Keen Claws - Analysis

Initial impression and tone

The poem presents a vivid, slightly surreal portrait of a single exalted parakeet. The tone is observant and paradoxical: admiring yet distanced, at once ornamental and intellectual. A subtle shift moves from visual exuberance in the opening images to a quieter, more contemplative end where motion is withheld despite display.

Authorial and historical context

Wallace Stevens, an American modernist poet, often explores imagination, perception, and the tension between reality and aesthetic ideal. Composed in the early 20th century modernist milieu, the poem's attention to language, color, and the mind's ordering reflects Stevens’s preoccupation with how consciousness shapes experience.

Main theme: Appearance versus inner life

The poem contrasts flamboyant outward display with interior immobility. Phrases like panache upon panache and the parade of tails emphasize surface spectacle, while lines such as His lids are white because his eyes are blind and He moves not on his coppery, keen claws suggest an inactive or inward-turned subject. The bird’s grandeur is therefore as much a created image as a living force.

Main theme: The intellect and will as organizing forces

Stevens frames the bird’s stillness as the operation of a pure intellect and deliberate will. The bird exerts / His will and applies its laws, implying that thought, ordering, or self-possession is what sustains the figure. The poem thus links aesthetic form to mental discipline rather than mere instinctive life.

Key images and symbols

Recurring images—color (gold, green, coppery), ornamental detail (tails, panache), and sensory paradoxes (white lids with blind eyes, a tip like a drop of water full of storms)—work as symbols of artifice and concentrated feeling. The coppery, keen claws become emblematic: implements of action that remain unused, suggesting latent power or controlled restraint. The ambiguity of the storm-drop at the tail’s tip invites reading it as compressed intensity—beauty that contains turmoil but does not release it.

Final synthesis

The poem celebrates aesthetic presence while probing what underlies it: a disciplined intellect and withheld motion. Through rich, paradoxical imagery Stevens questions whether beauty is animated by life or constituted by perception and will. The parakeet stands as a compact emblem of art’s splendor and its contained, contemplative power.