The Speaker

The central character in the poem is a first-person speaker. We learn nothing about her: even her gender is an assumption based on the comparison she makes to Lady Godiva and the fact that she calls herself "god's lioness" (4). The title of the poem, "Ariel", means "lion of God" and is a masculine name in Hebrew. Other than that, everything about the protagonist has to be deduced from the text itself: she is energetic, powerful, and bold, like the lion she names herself after.

The Horse

The other living figure in the poem is the horse the protagonist rides. Readers are told the horse is brown, with a long, arching neck.. It eventually merges with the speaker in her imagination, rendering them a kind of combined centaur-like creature from ancient mythology.