The speaker
William Wordsworth himself described the speaker in subsequent published editions of the poem. In fact, he explicitly stated that the person speaking the verse is an actual character, distinct from the poet, and not merely a representative of the poet himself. According to Wordsworth, the speaker is the captain of a small commercial boat who is now past middle-age and firmly set into a life of a pensioner retired to a small country village. It is important, Wordsworth stated, that this old captain lives in a part of the country to which he is not a native. In the wake of no longer having a purpose to get up for every day, the captain reveals a propensity toward talkativeness which in turn reveals a quasi-superstitious nature.
Martha Ray
The poem centers on a mystery surrounding a woman named Martha Ray. In her youth, Ray had fallen in love with a man named Stephen Hill—only to discover on the very day they were to wed that he was on his way to church to marry another. To make matters worse, she was also pregnant with Stephen’s child. Overcome with grief at the loss of the life she expected to have, she seeks a sanctuary high atop a mountain. There she remains for the subsequent twenty years, until the speaker relates her tale. In all that time, nobody ever saw the child she was supposedly carrying. Speculation ranges from a stillborn infant to infanticide, and the child's fate remains uncertain. Martha is now destitute and insane, and she is often heard wailing for her lost child.
Stephen Hill
Very little information is provided about Stephen Hill. All that can be known for sure—if the narrator can even be trusted—is that he is an insensitive and selfish man who took Martha Ray's virginity, convinced her that he loved her, and ultimately betrayed her by marrying another woman and leaving Martha Ray destitute and pregnant. In a sense, the character of Stephen Hill symbolizes the loss of innocence that comes with growing up. The innocent promises of love made in youth may turn into selfish lies when the passage into adulthood begins.
The Child
As the tale unfolds from a narrator who proves increasingly unreliable, doubt begins to creep in not only as to the fate of the unborn child, but whether Martha Ray was even pregnant. It is possible that she lost the child naturally through a stillbirth or miscarriage, or perhaps she is guilty of infanticide. The villagers claim to know the location of the burial site of the baby. However, they also claim that when an attempt was made to bring Martha to justice for killing the infant, the buried bones were somehow capable of creating an earthquake around the alleged burial site—thereby preventing them from confirming their suspicions. The fate of the child is therefore left ambiguous, with the only certainty being that the alleged child's mother leads a tortured existence as she mourns the loss of this child she claims to have had.
