The Speaker

The unnamed speaker is the narrator of the poem. While they do not refer to or describe themselves at any point in the text, their thoughts on John Milton and English society function to characterize them. Overall, the speaker is marked by their sense of longing or nostalgia for a bygone era, their critical perspective on modern England, and their reverence for Milton. They view England as a sort of paradise lost, having morally peaked during Milton’s era and entered into a steady decline in the century that followed, leading up to their own time, or 1802, as the title of the poem implies. The speaker considers modern England to have forsaken its values of inner happiness in favor of more earthly pursuits. They see Milton and the artistic and social period he represents as the solution to this moral decline.

The views of the speaker are...