Speaker
The speaker is, to an unusual degree, conflated with the poet in this work. This conflation occurs when the speaker instructs his lover to "take down this book," suggesting that the poem's speaker is in fact the author of the book in which the poem appears. This speaker is thoughtful and tender, expressing his love through a wistful scene—the imagined scenario of a faraway future, in which the lover remembers him fondly but sadly. Intensifying this wistful mood is the speaker's emphasis on the lover's sorrowful or complex qualities. While others may love her, he implies, only he recognizes the lovable nature of her sadness. Overall, this speaker is defined by his love for the listener, and by the nostalgic way in which he expresses that love.
The Lover
The speaker's lover comes to us entirely filtered through the speaker's own imagination. Moreover, his imagined image of her is a hypothetical one, since it involves projecting into a still-distant future. In the speaker's telling, the lover is beautiful, likable, and graceful, but with a more complicated and interesting side too. He refers to the depth in her eyes and the sorrow on her face, and imagines her reminiscing about their relationship in the future with sadness in her voice. Scholars generally agree that this poem was addressed to a real person: Maud Gonne, an actress aligned with the Irish nationalist and independence movements. Yeats and Gonne had a lengthy relationship. While this character can be understood as an independent poetic creation, therefore, she can also be understood as a version of a real-world individual.
