The Speaker
Contrary to what some people who have published analysis of this poet on various social media platforms appear to believe, the speaker of the poet is not himself either “the illiterate” or illiterate. It is difficult to get a grasp on any fundamentally truthful information about the speaker other than that he has a poetic soul who searches for ways to communicate difficult concepts through simile. Almost every word of the poem comprises one long extended simile in which the speaker compares the illiterate man on of the title to the how he feels about the unidentified person to whom he is addressing his thoughts.
The "Good" Person
The assumption of academics and scholars is that the person whose “goodness” the speaker touches is another man; a homosexual lover of the poet. The speaker compares himself to an illiterate man because his feelings for this other person feels like a language he doesn’t fully understand, but in which understand holds a wealth of profound emotions. Nothing overt in the poem indicates this homosexual subtext which informs scholarly study, but the background of the poet would seem to confirm the proposition.
The Illiterate
The illiterate man of the title who holds onto a letter he cannot read is the driving metaphor of the poem. When the speaker touches the goodness of the person he is addressing, the feeling he gets is one that compares to a man who cannot read, but paradoxically is able to enjoy all the possible emotions engendered by any number of potential realities contained within the letter. The point of the man incapable of reading the rare letter that arrives specifically for him is not his lack of literacy, but ironically his abundance of literacy. The mystery of language that seems impenetrable is actually a great big open window into world offering infinite possibilities.
