The Speaker
The speaker of the poem doesn’t directly say anything about himself. Everything that can be gathered about him must be done so allusively through context. What can be gleaned is that he is a fan of things like asymmetry, imperfection, and the natural flaws of existence that makes life interesting. He may be a Luddite of some sort—at least in reference to design and architecture—but it is not really machinery and industry he views as the enemy, but the desire to implement technological advancements for the purpose of erasing the past with expectations of improving it through the correction of imperfection.
“They”
The only other characters mentioned by pronoun in the text are the ambiguous and mysterious “they” which are, of course, the titular planners. But they are more than mere planners; they are also the builders and the two entities are not always necessarily interchangeable. Not much is really directly described about them except that they do plan and then build according to rigidly geometric specifications designed for the purpose of instituting architectural perfection. In their attempt to impose perfection upon what is imperfect it is vaguely suggested—and certainly not explicitly stated—that they creating something which is unnatural. The world is not a perfect place and so perfection paradoxically stands out to the speaker as the greatest imperfection.
