The speaker of “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” is enigmatic. Not only do we not get any concrete information about them, but they are also dispassionate and unstable. Like a third-person narrator in a novel or short story, the speaker has a degree of omniscience that allows them to perceive the actions and internal experiences described in each of the poem’s thirteen stanzas. The speaker “sees” all these actions and experiences, but they don’t seem to have any personal investment in them beyond simply conveying them to the reader. It’s precisely this lack of personal investment that makes the speaker dispassionate. Yet in addition to being dispassionate, the speaker is also unstable in the way that they inhabit such a wide range of “ways of looking at a blackbird.” In fact, the discontinuous nature of the poem seems to indicate that there may not be just one speaker. Given the unique point of view expressed in each stanza, it’s arguable that every stanza has its own speaker. Ultimately, it’s up to the reader to decide whether the poem conveys the vision of one speaker or a collage of several speakers’ visions.

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