Point of View

"The Phoenix and the Turtle" is written from a third-person perspective as the speaker describes the community of birds that have gathered for the funeral. Readers are not privy to who, exactly, this speaker is, but they appear to act as type of orchestrator or presider over the the rest of the birds. The speaker decides who attends to the funeral and who is barred, welcoming those birds traditionally associated with beauty and majesty and rejecting birds of prey. Whether the speaker is human, bird, or other non-human entity remains unclear, adding to the poem's difficulty.

The "threnos," or dirge at the end of the poem, is likely spoken by the character Reason, who laments the deaths of the phoenix and the turtledove. However, the speaker obscures this fact by referring to Reason as "it" when such virtues are usually gendered as "she." In this...