What or who is the main subject in the poem, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird?

The blackbird is the key figure in the poem. It is both an elusive and omnipresent referent, one which instills in the narrator a series of observations and reflections. Despite the weaving rumination that the bird’s presence sets in motion, by the end of the poem the bird is at it was, stoic and solitary amid the natural stillness described in the opening and closing cantos. In this way, the blackbird is a kind of fixture or register of presence, at once indifferent and somehow attentive to human existence.