The Speaker
The speaker is a human being directly addressing a lamb. Not a whole lot of information can be gleaned about the speaker, but one thing is certain as it is explicitly stated in stanza: the speaker is a child. Only one other really significant aspect of the individualism of the child can be derived from the text, a detail that is a little less explicit, but nevertheless quite clear from context. The speaker is a Christian. The details of the speaker are far not important because the child exists within the sphere of allegory; it is the symbolism of the child rather than the specific child itself which is of supreme importance in interpretation or analysis.
The Lamb
The titular creature is also not significant due to its individuality, but even its literal quality as a lamb is less is not the point of the poem. The poem begins with the child addressing the lamb with a series of rhetorical questions that inquire whether the baby animal is aware of the creator that gave it the ability to feed by the stream and mead and covered its fragile skin with its lush woolly coat of warmth and protection. The only reason that the species of the animal in the poem is a lamb is because of its allegorical reference to Jesus Christ as the “lamb of god.” Had the traditional sacrificial animal in the region which produced the texts of the Bible not been native to sheep, the child might well have been talking to a fawn or a foal.
