The Deserted Village | Character Analysis

Speaker

Narrating in the first person, the speaker remembers Auburn, the village of his childhood, and he laments that he will never be able to retire and die there because it has changed too much. For most of the poem, the speaker addresses the changing world at large and returns to his personal views at the poem's closing. He says goodbye to his sentimentalized village, and in the poem's final lines hopes that his poem will stop similar villages from being consumed by the same greed that destroyed Auburn.