The Speaker
The speaker, a drill instructor in the army, is neither named nor described: all that is conveyed about him is conveyed through his dialogue. A product of the military system, he is obsessed with order but lacks imagination. He follows a script that has performed so many times that he does not seem able to alter or tailor it to fit changing conditions, such as the fact that his listeners' rifles actually lack many of the parts he lists. He is a symbolic representative of authority, order, and the dehumanization and numbness necessary to make soldiers comfortable with violence. He is not entirely desensitized to beauty, but seems unable to integrate his perception of nature into his hierarchical and inflexible worldview: he seems to become overwhelmed and confused as he observes the natural world.
The Soldiers
Though little is known about the speaker, even less is known about his audience: the existence of soldiers is only implied, through the speaker's use of first-person plural and second-person pronouns. But the speaker's commanding rigidity makes the soldiers' conflict clear. While surrounded by a natural world full of beauty, sensuality, and life, they are being pressured to embrace a worldview dependent on desensitization and death. The poem avoids hinting at whether or not the soldiers adopt this militaristic worldview, only making clear that they are encouraged to do so.
