The Speaker

The Speaker: a real person that isn't the poet, but uses it for his or her poetry to describe the mood and tone of the poem in a way that readers can understand the poem better.

Ex:

Epitaph on a Tyrant
by W. H. Auden
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, And the poetry he invented was easy to understand; He knew human folly like the back of his hand, And was greatly interested in armies and fleets; When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

The speaker is extremely important to any poem because without the speaker a poem would just sound like a very boring poem and wouldn't give the reader much interest in reading it. Also, a poem wouldn't have a tone or a mood to it and without a tone or mood to the poem it makes it harder to understand the meaning of the play.

Ex:

Man and Wife
by Robert Lowell
Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother's bed; the rising sun in war paint dyes us red; in broad daylight her gilded bed-posts shine, abandoned, almost Dionysian. At last the trees are green on Marlborough Street, blossoms on our magnolia ignite the morning with their murderous five days' white. All night I've held your hand, as if you had a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad— its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye— and dragged me home alive. . . .Oh my Petite, clearest of all God's creatures, still all air and nerve: you were in your twenties, and I, once hand on glass and heart in mouth, outdrank the Rahvs in the heat of Greenwich Village, fainting at your feet— too boiled and shy and poker-faced to make a pass, while the shrill verve of your invective scorched the traditional South. Now twelve years later, you turn your back. Sleepless, you hold your pillow to your hollows like a child; your old-fashioned tirade— loving, rapid, merciless— breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head.