Speaker

The speaker is the unnamed and unidentified individual who directs the form, themes, and questions of each poem. The reader might argue that all of the poems collected in Goldenrod are written from a distinct poetic voice. However, the reader might also intuit a common identity from one speaker to the next.

In the case of the latter argument, the speaker is a middle-aged woman. She is the mother of two children, a boy and a girl. When her children are still young, her marriage begins to fail. Though her husband tells her, as referenced in "Poem Beginning with a Line from Bashō," that their divorce "was a long time coming," the speaker struggles to understand why and how their marriage fell apart (75). By drawing lines between others of the poems and their overlapping themes, the reader also intuits that the speaker grew up in Ohio. Though she...