Point of View

“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” is written from a first-person perspective. The narrator is unnamed but makes self-reference using the pronoun “I” and employs minimal descriptors of personal traits and history (8). The narrator recounts a specific scene in the first canto, as if having witnessed it in the past tense. The narrator then describes a subjective state of minds in the next canto. The poem follows from this initial point of orientation. But at various points this sense of perspective is scrambled. In the fourth canto a more proclaiming tone is used by the narrator, as if reciting scripture. In the fifth canto the narrator speaks in the present tense but then in the sixth canto reverts to the past tense in describing a scene from an interior vantage.

In the seventh canto the perspective is scattered further afield, as the narrator exhorts...