How does this stanza differ from that of the Romantic poems?

*speaker
*subject
*landscape
*sense of nature
*sense of God or divinity

Does this poem seem to be a poem about nature?
Does a speaker identify himself at the beginning?
Compare this depiction of nature to Wordsworth description of the daffodils? What are specific differences? Ask students to consider the movement of the blackbird versus the movement of the daffodils.

II: Divided Self; Detached Speaker: The speaker does not have a unified sense of self, and the distinct “I” continually disappears throughout the poem, detaching himself to the point at which the poem’s language, not the speaker, takes center stage.

III: Powerless and Alienated: The blackbird has no clear power/agency; the wind, by contrast, whirls around the blackbird, creating a sense of futility to the blackbird’s existence. Additionally, the blackbird is but a “small part” of the silent motions/gestures of the landscape.

IV: Riddles: Here, the reader is called upon to decipher meaning from this “riddle” or language puzzle. Meaning is not handed to the reader easily and clearly; instead, he or she must play language games as well.

V: Playing with Language: The speaker describes the beauty of language and demonstrates his own playing with language in the last two lines.

VI: Desolate World: Even nature (icicles) is “barbaric.”
Ambiguity: There is ambiguity in “the mood,” which is both ”traced in the shadow” (hence, unclear) and explicitly “indecipherable.”

VII: Allusive: Reference to information outside the poem: “men of Haddam,” a town in Connecticut.

VIII: Analytical: Again, riddle-like language.

IX: Fragmentation: From here on out, the poem becomes a series of seemingly disconnected vignettes. It is up to the reader to piece together meaning from these disconnected clips.

X: Description is Secondary: Description takes a back seat to play with allusive language.

XI: Convoluted: Here, the references to blackbirds are becoming convoluted, demonstrating the speaker’s preference for internal musings rather than clear descriptions.

XII: Additional disconnected musings/non sequiturs.

XIII: Meaning through Montage: The poem ends with continued play with language, and the poems comes full circle to the blackbird in the snowy mountains. This ending positions the speaker as one who has only imagined the poem internally via language, as opposed to one who has ventured concretely in nature. The reader is left with more questions than answers and is called upon, like the speaker, to attempt to create meaning from the poem’s fragments. The question is, “Can language convey meaning after all?”