Point of View

Like most poems, this text is written in a first-person point of view. That means that the narrator is a character who uses the personal pronoun “I” to locate himself in the text, as part of the story. However, in this poem, the narrator plays only a very small role. He does not actually “appear” in the poem until line 12. The first eleven lines are thus written as though they were in third person, describing various forms of disorder without making it clear who is doing the description or who is making these observations. Only at the very end does the speaker interrupt, offering up a few lines of interpretation to explain to the reader how he feels about what he has observed.

This use of point-of-view is effective for the poem’s themes. This is a poem of intellectual criticism of social trends, not...