Speaker
This poem has become popular among English teachers as a class assignment precisely because of the ambiguity of the speaker’s identity. The nature of the confusion over character identity essentially boils down to what Daffy Duck might pose as “pronoun trouble.” It is clearly the narrator of the poem who is speaking the first two lines which identify the dead man as “he.” What remains unclear throughout is the relationship of the speaker to everybody else.
The Dead Man
The pronoun trouble gets started in the poem’s third line when the use of “I” appears to shift the identity of the person speaking to the dead man. Of course, this explanation immediately raises the obvious objection: how is a dead man talking? So the question for analysis becomes are lines 3 and 4 (as well as 9, 11, and 12) actually supposed to be the dead man talking or is this still the original speaker conveying what the dead man might have been trying to say?
The Bystanders
The second stanza initiates what appears to be another shift in perspective and still another shift in pronoun use. The final line of the stanza “They said” appears to attribute the comments made in reference to the dead man to a group of bystanders that does not include the speaker of the first lines since logic dictates that it is the original speaker who clarifies that “They said” those things.
