The Speaker
Since this poem is written in the form of a sonnet, it can be assumed that the speaker represents a subject conveying an experience. In this case, the speaker is in fact a character, as verified by the first-person plural, “we” in line 3. Throughout the poem, the speaker chronicles her experience of looking through the many portraits of a woman in an unnamed artist’s studio. Since the speaker stands as the reader’s only source of perspective on the scene, one must remember that her thoughts and musing on the studio come from her perspective. The speaker presents only her experience of a situation.
The Artist
Although the artist never makes a physical appearance in the poem, his presence is constantly felt. The spectral artist’s absence makes the poem cohesive. He painted the pictures in this studio, and his strange fixation on the woman he paints leads the speaker to spend nearly a third of the sonnet on developing his character as a sort of parasite feeding off of his own artistic ideations. Without the artist, the sonnet does not exist.
The Woman in the Portrait
The woman in the portrait stands as the most central character in this poem. Like the artist, she is not actually present in the scene, but as the speaker interacts with her in the portraits, she is described as someone beautiful, royal, happy, and ultimately idealized beyond any possible reality. Notably, her representation is the occasion for the speaker to turn her attention towards the artist, and, through his perspective on the woman in the portrait, we see the artist's own characteristics.
