The Speaker

The unnamed speaker of “Reapers” remains generally static and unchanging throughout the body of the poem. Though the speaker uses first-person, he lacks the subjectivity and personal agency often associated with the use of I-statements, focusing on what “I see” – the only way in which he directly mentions himself that remains the same at the beginning of the poem in line two and the end in line seven – rather than what he feels about what he sees. Therefore, the speaker seems to gesture towards objectivity despite his use of first-person, as though he a photographer capturing a snapshot from the daily life of the reapers. This objectivity imparts an ethnographic quality to the speaker’s tone, as though he is simply trying to capture reality as it appears without forcibly imposing his own biases and interpretations onto it. In this reading of the speaker, he comes across...