Lethe

Lethe Character List

The speaker / the reader

Although we do not know the speaker's identity, she has a clear vision of what the reader or recipient of her words will experience. The recipient, on the other hand, is us, or at least someone that the reader may identify with. Because the poem is written in the second person—adressing the reader as a "you"—the speaker's words are sensory, subjective, and seductive—guiding the reader to inhabit the speaker's vision for us. The reader, on the other hand, is one who confronts the difficulty and pain of the human condition, and may indeed feel seduced by the promise of lethe that the poem evokes.