Speaker
The speaker is the only character in the poem. In an interview conducted a quarter century after the poem’s 1990 publication, the poet recalled that summer day as one in which the 90th birthday of a Mrs. Segura was being celebrated with a cake and a grasshopper leapt onto her plate as if saying he’d like a piece. With this recollection, it becomes entirely appropriate to identify the unnamed speaker of the poem with the poet herself. The speaker is, therefore, Mary Oliver and the poem is her recollection of a very specific moment from her past. This specificity accounts for why the poem is titled "The Summer Day" rather than "A Summer Day." It is clearly about a very singularly memorable day.
In recalling this seemingly trivial and forgettable moment in which a grasshopper sat eating sugar out her hand, the speaker is offering more information about herself allusively rather than explicitly. That she notices details about the grasshopper, like how the jaws move sideways rather than up-and-down and uses its forearms to wash its face before leaving is a strong indication that the speaker is very attuned to nature. And, indeed, Mary Oliver is most famous for her poems that describe the natural world—this is, in fact, typically regarded as her most famous work.
The structural framework of the poem also offers penetrating insight into the psychology of the speaker. The first three lines of the poem are all questions posed to readers that begin with the word “who” and which asks them to identify the party responsible for making the world, swans, black bears, and, of course, grasshoppers. In addition to these questions, the poem ends with three more questions posed to the reader. The concluding questions are less direct and require more complex answers, but ironically they are also more easily answered than the opening queries. What these questions directly posed to the reader very strongly imply about the speaker is that she is not just curious about the world around her, but is eager to share that curiosity with others and bring.
