Point of View

"Wild Geese" is written from the perspective of an unnamed first-person speaker who addresses the reader directly using the second-person pronoun "you." This pronoun elicits the reader's participation in the poem as the speaker instructs the reader to share about despair, notice phenomena in nature, and heed the world's call to union. "Wild Geese" specifically addresses readers who suffer from loneliness and despair, but anyone can take comfort in its message. The speaker is aware of the general pressure people are under to be perfect, and of the internal suffering that this pressure causes. Empathy is the primary tone the speaker uses, for example by identifying with the reader's despair in line six: "Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine." In this way, the speaker embodies his or herself as being in conversation with the reader, in a sense breaking the...