Point of View

“All Hallows” is told from the perspective of a disembodied speaker who observes the events unfolding in a rural landscape. The lack of pronouns indicates that the speaker is never fleshed out as a character. Despite the detached tone, the degree of details in the poem portrays the speaker as attentive and able to witness without emoting. In the first stanza, the speaker looks out across a field and depicts a quiet yet dynamic landscape that seems to govern itself. The speaker implies a force (which could be the landscape itself) that assembles its various components.

The speaker’s own perspective does not appear until the beginning of the second stanza in the lines, “This is the barrenness / of harvest or pestilence” (8-9). This declaration is not tied to a named “I,” which aligns with the poem’s themes of liminality and ambiguity. From there...