Speaker
The speaker is for the most part unidentified in terms of age, background, and most other features. What we do know is that she is a woman addressing her lover and that she has strong opinions and feelings about love. She believes that love can and should be eternal, and tries to explain to her beloved how to go about expressing that particular variety of eternal love. To the speaker, proclamations of love based on fleeting attributes like beauty or even like-mindedness are by their nature impermanent. She therefore asks the addressee to instead speak of love for its own sake, independently of such transient characteristics. Contextual knowledge tells us that this poem is also partly autobiographical, written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning for her husband, the poet Robert Browning.
Addressee
Similarly, contextual knowledge lets us know that the original addressee of this poem was Robert Browning himself. However, the poem itself reveals even less about its listener than it does about its speaker. The listener never speaks and is never directly described in this sonnet, so our knowledge of them comes only from the way the speaker talks to them. We know from what the speaker says that the two are in love, although the listener appears to have somewhat different instincts about love than the speaker does.
