Who is speaking, to whom, and from where — the foundational questions every reader must ask before any other act of poetic interpretation
When you open a novel, you usually know fairly quickly who is narrating — a named character, a third-person observer, a first-person witness. When you open a poem, the situation is often less certain. A voice speaks. Words arrive. But whose voice is it? And to whom?
These are not casual questions. They determine everything else you understand about the poem. Knowing who speaks, under what circumstances, and to whom is the essential first act of poetic interpretation — the ground on which all other analysis stands.
This chapter introduces six interlocking concepts: the distinction between poet and speaker; persona and voice; addressee and audience; dramatic situation; apostrophe and direct address; and speaker reliability. Together, these tools give students a precise vocabulary and a clear method for answering the most fundamental questions any poem asks its reader.
Consider the difference between a person telling a story at a dinner table, that same person reading the story in a courtroom, and a person whispering it to a close friend late at night. The words might be the same. But the speaker's relationship to the situation, the audience, and the meaning changes dramatically depending on who is speaking, where, to whom, and why. Poetry works the same way. Before you can understand what a poem means, you need to understand who is saying it and from where.
This chapter trains students to ask, before anything else: Who is speaking? To whom? Under what circumstances? And why does it matter? Identifying the speaker, the situation, and the address of a poem is the essential first act of poetic interpretation. Until these questions are answered — even provisionally — no other analysis can proceed on firm ground.
The most important distinction in reading poetry — and one of the most frequently misunderstood — is the difference between the poet and the speaker.
The poet is the actual human being who wrote the poem: a person with a biography, a historical context, a set of beliefs and experiences, a body, a life. The speaker is the voice inside the poem: the consciousness that says "I," that addresses the reader, that inhabits the language.
These two are not the same.
This might seem obvious when a poem is set in a distant historical period or when it is spoken by someone clearly different from the poet — an ancient warrior, a grieving widow, a murderous duke. But students consistently collapse this distinction even in lyric poems that seem personal and direct. When a poet writes "I am tired of living in this city," students assume the poet is tired of that city. When a poet writes "I want to die," students assume the poet is suicidal. When a poet writes "I love you," students assume the poet loves the poem's addressee.
These assumptions can be seriously wrong — not merely as a matter of literary fact, but as a matter of interpretive method.
First, it protects interpretation. If we assume the speaker is always the poet, we reduce every poem to autobiography. We start asking "Was the poet really in love?" instead of "What does this speaker reveal about love?" The poem becomes a document about the poet's life rather than an exploration of a shared human subject.
Second, it opens up creative possibility. Poets frequently construct speakers who are not themselves — speakers of different genders, ages, moral positions, or historical periods. This creative construction is not deception; it is one of poetry's fundamental powers.
Third, it allows for irony. A poet may construct a speaker whose values or perceptions the poet clearly does not share. The gap between what the speaker says and what the poem actually means is one of the richest sources of poetic complexity.
Fourth, it reminds us that poetry is art, not confession. Even poems that feel deeply personal are crafted objects. The "I" in a poem has been selected, arranged, shaped, and placed within a structure. It is not simply the poet's raw experience poured onto the page.
I have burned every letter you ever wrote me.
The smoke rose in a column toward the hill.
I watched it go and felt nothing but cold.
Some things should not be kept. Some things should spill
into the air and disappear for good.
Who is speaking here? We do not know. We know only that the speaker has destroyed letters, watched the smoke, and feels emotionally detached. The speaker might be male or female, young or old, guilty or relieved or grieving. The poet who wrote these lines might have burned no letters at all.
What matters is not what the poet has done. What matters is what the speaker reveals about loss, finality, emotional numbness, and the deliberate erasure of relationship. When we ask "What does this poem mean?" we should be asking about the speaker's experience as it is constructed in the poem — not about the poet's biography.
Some poems blur the line between poet and speaker more than others. Confessional poetry — a mid-twentieth-century movement associated with poets such as Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and Anne Sexton — deliberately cultivated the impression of autobiographical directness. These poems often seem to speak from the poet's lived experience.
Yet even in confessional poetry, the speaker is a construction. The poem is shaped, edited, arranged. The "I" of the poem has been crafted to produce certain effects. Knowing this does not diminish the poems; it helps us read them more carefully rather than simply using them as biographical sources.
Always distinguish poet from speaker, even when the poem seems personal. You may, after careful analysis, decide that the speaker seems very close to the poet's own position — but you should reach that conclusion through interpretation, not assumption.
A persona is a mask. The word comes from Latin and originally referred to the masks worn by actors in classical theater — the external face the performer adopted to embody a character. In poetry, a persona is the constructed voice or character through whom a poem is spoken.
| Persona Type | Description | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Historical persona | The poet speaks as a real historical figure at a specific moment | Explores what such a figure might have felt or thought; illuminates history through imagination |
| Mythological persona | The poet speaks as a god, hero, or mythological figure | Reframes ancient stories from the inside; gives unfamiliar depth to familiar myths |
| Marginalized persona | The poet gives voice to someone historically excluded or silenced | Common in postcolonial, feminist, and witness poetry; restores subjectivity to the erased |
| Fictional persona | The poet constructs a purely invented character | Allows exploration of moral complexity, extreme experience, or unfamiliar perspective |
| Dramatic monologue | A speaker-character addresses an implied listener in a specific dramatic situation | The gap between the speaker's self-presentation and the reader's understanding is the poem's meaning |
Voice is broader than persona. Every poem has a voice — a quality of tone, diction, rhythm, and attitude that characterizes its speaker. But not every poem has a clearly defined persona. When a poet adopts a role clearly distinct from themselves, the persona becomes the central analytical category.
The dramatic monologue is one of the most powerful persona forms. In a dramatic monologue, a speaker who is clearly a character (not the poet) addresses an implied listener; the speaker's words reveal more about their character than they perhaps intend; the reader is positioned to observe from a critical distance; and the gap between what the speaker says and what the reader understands is the poem's primary meaning.
My wife was too kind, everyone agreed.
She smiled too readily at passing men.
I gave her gifts: a painting, a pearl necklace.
But nothing taught her to smile only for me.
It was a simple lesson. She has learned it now.
The portrait on the wall still has her smile.
The speaker presents this account calmly. But the language betrays him: "Too kind" frames ordinary friendliness as excessive; "smile only for me" reveals a desire to possess even the wife's emotional responses; "A simple lesson. She has learned it now" — what was the lesson? The portrait on the wall suggests the wife is dead, but the speaker never says so. The evasion is itself revealing.
The poet is not this speaker. The persona is a character whose chilling self-justification is the subject of the poem. The reader understands something the speaker does not intend to reveal: this is a man who has destroyed his wife for the crime of ordinary warmth. That gap between the speaker's self-perception and the reader's understanding is the characteristic effect of the dramatic monologue.
Most poems have someone they seem to be speaking to. This person, creature, object, or abstraction is called the addressee. The addressee is not the same as the audience.
The addressee is who or what the speaker is directly addressing within the poem. The audience is who the poem is ultimately meant to reach — the readers who encounter it on the page.
Identifying the addressee is crucial because it shapes everything about the poem's tone, relationship, and stakes.
| Addressee Type | Example | What It Creates |
|---|---|---|
| A specific individual | A named beloved, a dead friend, a child | Intimate relationship; the emotional and dramatic center of the poem |
| A generalized "you" | Any reader who encounters the poem | Inclusivity; the reader becomes implicated in the poem's address |
| An absent person | Someone dead, gone, or far away | Pathos; the impossibility of response intensifies longing or grief |
| A nonhuman entity | An animal, a natural force, a concept | Apostrophe; the rhetorical animation of the non-responsive |
| The self | The speaker addressing themselves | Interior dialogue; self-reckoning; introspection made dramatic |
| God or the divine | Prayer, complaint, petition, praise | Reaches toward something larger; models the human posture before the infinite |
One of the most interesting features of poetic address is that the addressee almost never speaks back. The poem is, in most cases, one side of a dialogue whose other side we never hear. This gives the reader an unusual position: we overhear the speaker's words to someone who cannot answer.
What the speaker says, then, is shaped partly by the silence on the other side. The beloved does not correct the speaker's perception. The dead parent cannot respond. The indifferent night offers no reply. We are positioned to notice what the speaker assumes, what they long for, what they project onto the silent addressee — and sometimes to wonder whether the speaker's version of events is entirely reliable.
Every time you read a poem, ask: "Who is the speaker talking to?" Tone, emotional register, and power dynamics all change depending on the nature of the addressee. A poem addressed to a beloved has a different texture than a poem addressed to an adversary. A poem addressed to death has different stakes than a poem addressed to a flower.
The dramatic situation of a poem is the full set of circumstances surrounding the speaking moment: who is speaking, to whom, where, when, under what conditions, with what urgency, and with what apparent purpose.
Many students read poems as if they exist in a contextless void — disembodied language floating above any particular moment. But poems are almost always grounded in a situation. Someone is speaking somewhere, to someone, about something that matters. Identifying that situation is the first act of interpretation.
The dramatic situation is often not stated directly. It must be inferred from the poem's details: a word here, an image there, a shift in tone that signals something has changed or is at stake.
Three weeks since you moved out. The towels
are still folded the way you left them.
I haven't touched them. I don't know why.
Maybe I think if I unfold them, something ends
that isn't quite over yet. I'm not making sense.
You never minded when I didn't make sense.
The dramatic situation here is clear even though it is never stated outright: a relationship has ended, the speaker is alone, and they are addressing the absent partner. The detail of the folded towels carries enormous emotional weight precisely because it is concrete and specific — it reveals the speaker's reluctance to accept finality.
Students who learn to read for dramatic situation learn to read for the specificity that makes a poem alive. The situation is always embedded in particulars; the interpreter's job is to find them.
Apostrophe is one of the most ancient and powerful devices in poetry. It is the act of directly addressing something absent, dead, abstract, or ordinarily unable to respond. When a poet addresses death, a natural force, a season, an absent beloved, a dead friend, or God, the poet is using apostrophe.
The word comes from the Greek for "turning away" — the speaker turns from the ordinary audience to address something or someone beyond.
| Function | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Animates the inanimate | By addressing an abstraction or nonhuman entity directly, the poet treats it as if it has the capacity to hear and respond — creating a kind of rhetorical life in the subject |
| Intensifies emotion | Direct address creates urgency. "I think about death sometimes" is a reflection. "Death, I have thought about you every day since she died" is a confrontation. |
| Creates a speaker-subject relationship | Apostrophe positions the speaker in relation to what they address: supplicant or challenger, grieving or angry, in awe or in combat |
| Exposes what cannot be answered | Because the apostrophized subject cannot respond, apostrophe creates pathos — the speaker speaks into silence |
| Allows inexpressible articulation | Sometimes what we most need to say cannot be said to an ordinary human audience. Apostrophe creates space to speak toward God, the sea, the abstract force that has shaped a life. |
Apostrophe appears across traditions with remarkable consistency, though its purposes and frameworks differ.
In the Hebrew Psalms, direct address to God is the defining feature. The Psalms are songs of petition, praise, complaint, and gratitude — "How long, O Lord, will you hide your face?" — modeling a mode of intimate relationship with the divine that has shaped religious poetry across centuries and traditions.
In classical Arabic poetry, the qasida (ode) often opens with the speaker addressing the ruins of a beloved's campsite — the conventional nasib. The speaker addresses the traces of the departed, the marks of where the beloved once lived. From the very opening, Arabic literary tradition encodes longing into the form of address.
In West African praise poetry (oriki), the speaker addresses the subject directly — cataloguing their names, genealogies, deeds, and attributes. The praise poem is performative address: the speaking of the name, the listing of attributes, itself constitutes honor.
In Indigenous American oral traditions, address to the natural world is often not metaphorical but relational — speaking to a river, a mountain, a bear, or an ancestor is understood as genuine communication, not rhetorical device. The apostrophe that European traditions treat as a figure of speech participates in a very different framework when read within its own tradition.
There is a deep connection between apostrophe and prayer. Both involve speaking toward something that may not hear, may not answer, and cannot respond in any ordinary sense. Yet the act of speaking is itself meaningful — a kind of reaching. This is why apostrophe appears so often in poems of grief, loss, and longing. The speaker needs to speak to the person who has died, to the time that has passed, to the love that has ended — even knowing no response is possible.
O city of my childhood, have you kept
the alley where we played until the dark
called us inside? Has the fig tree kept
its twisted arms? I left you like a ship
leaves harbor — already planning to return —
and came back forty years too late.
Forgive me. Or don't. You won't, I know.
Cities don't forgive. They simply change.
The city cannot hear. The fig tree cannot respond. The speaker knows this — "Cities don't forgive. They simply change" — and yet speaks anyway. The apostrophe creates an emotional intensity that a reflective, third-person description of returning to a hometown could not achieve. The directness of address makes the loss palpable.
Don't be angry. I know how it looks.
I came back different than I left —
Quieter, slower. My hands remember
things you haven't asked about yet.
Give me a week, maybe two.
The noise in my head will settle.
I used to know how to sit in a room with you.
I'll remember. Just give me some time.
I used to watch them move across the page —
those hands that held the pen like something sacred,
that sorted seeds and balanced ledger lines,
that smoothed my hair when I was sick with fever.
Now I hold your pen, Father, in my own hands,
and cannot find the weight of yours inside it.
The ink runs just the same. The paper takes it.
But something in the writing has gone silent.
Keep my hand steady, if you're anywhere.
Or if you're not, at least forgive me this:
that I keep writing to you, knowing
you cannot write me back.
Not every speaker in a poem is telling the whole truth. Not every speaker perceives clearly. Not every speaker is in a stable emotional state. And not every speaker intends for the reader to simply accept their account as accurate.
Speaker reliability is the degree to which the reader can trust a speaker's account, perception, claims, and self-understanding. Speakers may be unreliable for many reasons: emotional distortion; self-deception; deliberate manipulation; innocence or naivety; or cultural and ideological blindness.
The best way to assess speaker reliability is to look for gaps — places where what the speaker says does not quite match what the poem's details suggest. Some useful questions:
Does the speaker claim to feel something that their language contradicts? Does the speaker's account leave something unexplained? Does the poem provide details that undercut the speaker's self-presentation? Is the speaker working very hard to justify something that doesn't need justification if it is truly innocent? Does the speaker's description of another character reveal more about the speaker than about that character?
Return to the dramatic monologue from Section 14.2. The speaker presents his account calmly and with apparent reasonableness. But note the gaps: "too kind" frames ordinary friendliness as excessive; wanting her to "smile only for me" reveals a desire to possess the wife's emotional responses; "She has learned it now" followed by the portrait on the wall implies she is dead — but the speaker never says so. The evasion is itself revealing.
The speaker is unreliable not because he is confused but because he is self-justifying. The poem's meaning lies entirely in the gap between the speaker's calm account and the horror the details imply.
When a speaker seems unreliable, students sometimes decide the speaker is simply mistaken and that the poem is "correcting" them. But unreliable narration is more complex. The speaker's distortion, self-justification, or misperception is itself meaningful — it reveals character, situation, and emotional truth. When you notice gaps, do not simply correct the speaker. Ask: "Why does the speaker present it this way? What does this gap reveal?"
Some poems are spoken by a single stable voice throughout. Others shift — in speaker, in address, in dramatic situation, in temporal frame. Learning to notice these shifts is crucial to accurate interpretation.
| Shift Type | What Changes | What to Ask |
|---|---|---|
| Shift in time | The poem moves between past and present, or memory and the speaking moment | How does the speaker's relation to the events change? What does the movement between times reveal? |
| Shift in address | The poem turns from one addressee to another | What drives the pivot? What changes in the speaker's emotional position? |
| Shift in tone | The speaker's attitude changes — grief to acceptance, anger to tenderness | Where exactly does the tone shift? What precipitates it? |
| Shift in knowledge | The speaker comes to understand something previously unknown | What has been revealed? How does this revelation change the poem's meaning? |
| Multiple voices | More than one speaker is present — dialogue, alternating structure, call and response | Which voice is speaking at each moment? How do the voices relate to each other? |
The Italian word volta (turn) is used in sonnet criticism to describe the pivot point where a poem's direction or argument changes. But the concept applies broadly: many poems have a volta — a moment where something shifts and the poem opens onto a new understanding. Ask: Where does the poem turn? What changes after the turn?
When you were small, I counted all your fingers —
ten, and ten toes, and the wrists so thin
I thought: how does anything so small survive?
The world is enormous and careless and fast.
Now you are leaving for the same enormous world.
I want to give you something to hold onto —
the right words, a map, a sure way home.
I have nothing but this: I counted you once
and found you whole. Go. I'll keep counting.
The poem shifts between past and present (stanzas one and two). The earlier anxiety about fragility transforms — in the volta — into a fierce, loving release. "Go. I'll keep counting" is the turn: the speaker cannot protect the child, but they can continue to hold them in their attention. The shift from past to present is also a shift from fear to acceptance.
After identifying the speaker, the addressee, the dramatic situation, and any relevant devices of address, the final step is to integrate all of these observations into a coherent interpretation of the speaking voice. The speaking voice is not just who the speaker is — it is the quality of consciousness the poem embodies: the way of perceiving, feeling, reasoning, and expressing that characterizes the poem's presence on the page.
| Dimension | What It Covers | Questions to Ask |
|---|---|---|
| Attitude | The speaker's stance toward subject, addressee, and self | Is the speaker reverent, ironic, grieving, defiant, tender, cold, desperate, serene? |
| Diction | The kinds of words the speaker uses | Formal or informal? Elevated or plain? Abstract or concrete? What does word choice reveal? |
| Rhythm | How the speaker moves through language | Quickly or slowly? Long winding sentences or short clipped phrases? What does rhythm reveal about emotional state? |
| Self-awareness | How aware the speaker is of their own situation or contradictions | Does the speaker acknowledge the limits of their address? Do they deceive themselves? Are they unselfconscious or acutely aware? |
Notice who is speaking and to whom. Question whether the speaker is reliable and what they want. Pattern the repeated details that characterize the speaker's voice. Interpret what those patterns reveal about attitude, tone, and self-awareness. Support your interpretation with specific textual evidence. Connect your reading of the speaker to the poem's larger theme.
The act of addressing someone directly in poetry has ancient roots across traditions. Understanding how different cultures have used poetic address illuminates the richness and diversity of this fundamental technique.
Direct address to God is the defining feature of the Psalms. The speaker cries out, argues, pleads, and praises in direct address: "How long, O Lord, will you hide your face?" This creates a voice simultaneously humble and urgent, trusting and desperate — and it has shaped religious poetry across centuries and traditions.
The qasida conventionally opens with the speaker addressing the ruins of a beloved's campsite — the nasib. The speaker addresses traces, marks, the evidence of where the beloved once lived. From the very opening, Arabic literary tradition encodes longing into the form of address: presence is evoked precisely by speaking to its absence.
Haiku rarely speaks in an explicit "I" or addresses a "you." The voice is effaced, creating pure observation. Yet the haiku addresses the reader indirectly — it creates a shared moment of perception that is itself a form of lyric address. The poem invites the reader into a moment of seeing, and that invitation is a kind of address without apostrophe.
In Yoruba praise poetry, the speaker addresses the subject directly, cataloguing their names, genealogies, deeds, and attributes. The praise poem is performative address: the speaking of the name, the listing of attributes, itself constitutes honor. The subject may be present, receiving the praise — making the address active in a way that elegiac apostrophe is not.
The persona poem — the practice of speaking through a constructed voice — appears across traditions with remarkable consistency, though its forms and purposes vary widely.
In classical Chinese poetry, writing in the voice of a historical figure was well established. Poets wrote in the persona of famous hermits, emperors, and court ladies longing for absent husbands. These persona poems used the historical figure as a lens through which to explore contemporary political or philosophical concerns. The speaker was recognized as a mask, but the mask carried real meaning.
In Persian Sufi poetry, the speaker's "I" is simultaneously personal and spiritual. When Rumi's speaker longs for the beloved, the beloved is at once a human person and the divine. The persona oscillates between registers, refusing to be fixed. Reading for the speaker in Persian Sufi poetry requires holding multiple possibilities in mind at once.
In Yoruba oriki, the praise singer adopts a traditional voice — not wholly personal, not wholly formulaic, but shaped by tradition and the specific occasion. The "I" of the oriki is both individual and communal, merging personal expression with inherited speaking position.
In the English Romantic tradition, the dramatic monologue as developed in the nineteenth century created a new kind of persona poem — one in which the speaker's moral world is revealed through their own words, and the gap between self-perception and reader understanding is the poem's primary effect. This tradition of critical distance within the lyric continues into contemporary poetry.
These traditions share the recognition that the speaking "I" in poetry is always a construction — and that the construction carries meaning.
The most common and most damaging mistake. It reduces poetry to autobiography and ignores the craft of persona construction. Always distinguish poet from speaker, even when the poem seems personal. Ask: "What do I actually know about this speaker from what the poem tells me?" Do not import the poet's biography unless the poem explicitly invites that connection.
Students often focus entirely on the speaker and forget to ask who the speaker is addressing. The addressee shapes everything about tone, relationship, and stakes. Every time you read a poem, ask: "Who is the speaker talking to?" If the addressee changes within the poem, note the shift and ask what it means.
When a poet says "O Death" or "O Wind," students sometimes assume the poem is simply "about" death or wind, making a thematic statement about those topics. While this is not wholly wrong, it misses the rhetorical dimension. Apostrophe is a mode of address; the question is not only what the poem says about death or wind, but what the act of addressing them reveals about the speaker's situation, desire, or emotional state.
When a speaker seems unreliable, students sometimes decide the speaker is mistaken and that the poem is correcting them. But unreliable narration is more complex than simple error. The speaker's distortion or self-justification is itself meaningful — it reveals character, situation, and emotional truth. Ask why the speaker presents it this way, not merely that they are wrong.
Not every lyric poem is an expression of the poet's genuine feelings. Some lyric poems use a persona; some are constructed; some are ironic; some are experiments in voice. Reading all lyric poems as sincere personal expression is as limiting as reading all poems as puzzles with hidden answers. Approach every poem asking what kind of speaker this seems to be, rather than assuming it is always transparent autobiography.
Write a two-paragraph analysis of the speaker in one of the poems discussed in this chapter or in your assigned reading. Your analysis should address: What can we know about the speaker from the poem alone? Is the speaker reliable? What evidence supports your claim? What does the speaker want, need, or long for? How does the speaker's voice — tone, diction, attitude — reveal character? Use the MGU Literary Analysis Paragraph Model throughout.
For each of the three passages below, answer the following questions: (1) Who is the speaker? (2) Who is the addressee? (3) What is the dramatic situation? (4) Is there evidence of speaker unreliability — explain. (5) Write one sentence of interpretation connecting speaker, situation, and address to the passage's meaning.
I never meant to stay so long. Forgive me —
the years have a way of slipping without notice.
I meant to visit every spring.
And here you are, unchanged, as always:
the stone just as I left it, the grass
growing back the way grass does
after too long without tending.
Say nothing. I know.
You taught me everything I know about patience —
how to wait for the tide to turn,
how to read the angle of the light.
I used to think you knew some secret.
Now I think you simply waited,
and the waiting looked like wisdom.
I'm trying to learn the difference.
My lord, I beg you — hear me before you rule.
I am not what the report has named me.
The witness was mistaken, or was paid.
I have served your house for thirty years.
My hands are clean. I swear it by the graves
of all I love. My hands —
Look at them. Look closely.
You see? Clean.
Find a poem that seems autobiographical — one that uses "I" and appears to speak from personal experience. As a class, discuss: what evidence does the poem offer that the speaker is or is not the poet? What interpretive difference does it make if we assume the speaker and the poet are the same? What changes if we hold them apart?
Many poems address someone who cannot respond — a dead person, an absent beloved, God, a season. Why do poets choose to speak toward something that cannot answer? What does this device make possible that ordinary dialogue cannot? Share examples from your reading and discuss what each poem gains from the silence on the other side.
Compare how unreliable speakers work in poetry and in fiction. What does each form allow? What does each form make more difficult? Is it easier to detect unreliability in a dramatic monologue or in a first-person novel? What techniques does each form use to signal that the speaker's account should be questioned?
The Context Window in this chapter describes how different traditions use poetic address — the Hebrew Psalms, the Arabic nasib, the Japanese haiku, the Yoruba oriki. As a class, discuss: what does the comparison of these traditions reveal about what is universal in poetic address, and what is culturally specific? What assumptions about address do you bring from your own reading tradition?
Chapter 14 has established how to identify who is speaking and from where — the essential ground of poetic interpretation. Chapter 15 turns to how poetry sounds: rhythm, meter, stress, rhyme, alliteration, assonance, consonance, and sound symbolism. You will learn how the sound of a poem — the way it moves in time when heard — creates meaning that goes beyond what the words denote. The tools of this chapter will be integrated with everything you have learned about speaker and address: because voice is not only a matter of who is speaking, but also of how that speaker moves through language.