Point of View

The speaker’s position in the poem is rather ambiguous. On the one hand, the speaker narrates from John Cabot’s perspective while also mocking him. In this way, the poem is not quite from Cabot’s perspective, but is being filtered through his perceptions. This mode of narration is called free-indirect discourse. Free-indirect discourse is a type narration in which a third-person narrator takes on the thoughts and feelings of a character’s subjectivity so that it feels as if the reader is in a first-person narration. As such, “Riot” is told from Cabot’s perspective, but the reader is not necessarily meant to sympathize with him. Using sarcasm, the speaker narrates Cabot’s thoughts so that he is revealed for what he is: a racist who only cares about his possessions.

That said, Cabot’s perspective does predominate throughout the poem. The speaker...