The speaker
The speaker of the poem is someone who watches the woman singing on the beach of Key West. All the poem reveals about the speaker is through his thoughts and observations. If the singing woman exemplifies the artistic creator, then the speaker is her audience, for most of the poem. This position of audience is an interesting one for Wallace Stevens to take, as a poet himself: so, the speaker of this poem also functions as a way for him temporarily to step outside of his role and examine the act of creation from a listener's perspective. Still, the speaker is creating art in the process of delivering the poem to us, and we are then his audience: so, the artist-audience relationships are complicated in the poem. It shows us a chain of inspiration and creation, from the sea to the woman to the speaker to Stevens' readers, in which meaning is absorbed and reformulated at each step.
The singing woman
This unnamed figure is the central focus of attention in the poem; it is her song by the water that launches the speaker's train of thought. She has great authority and power to create meaning and reshape the way her audience perceives the waves, sky, and harbor, even after her song ends and she disappears from the poem in stanza five. This disappearance is cited by critic Brooke Baeten as a sign of Stevens dismissing the female creative voice from his work in favor of a masculine voice, or downplaying her role as his muse. Other critics argue that the woman is the ultimate artistic authority, or that there is a more nuanced balance of creative power among the sea's "voice," the woman's, and the poet's. Alternatively, the woman may represent Stevens' own internal poetic voice or muse, an external projection of his creative spirit.
Ramon Fernandez
The speaker's companion, presumably also present on the beach, is not addressed until the penultimate stanza, when the speaker turns to him for interpretive help. He implores Ramon, "tell me, if you know," why the night suddenly appears magnificently ordered. In the chain of artists and audiences, Ramon Fernandez also serves as an audience to the woman's song, and is also invited by the speaker to fill the unique role of commentator. This has led to suppositions that Fernandez represents the role of the literary critic, called on to give an evaluation of the art. However, he never gets to respond, perhaps indicating that an explanation for the speaker's experience is unnecessary or even impossible, or that, as James Longenbach argues, any "certain" answer he could have given would have been wrong by virtue of its certainty. Although Stevens claimed that he "chose two everyday Spanish names" at random, he was also undoubtedly aware of a prominent literary scholar and critic at the time named Ramon Fernandez—making the critic symbolism all the more likely, despite the author's stubborn statement, or an unlikely coincidence.
