Speaker
The speaker is the main character of this poem despite the opening lines situating a plot about screaming children. The gender is unknown. The age is unknown. There are no clues to ethnicity, cultural heritage, or nationality. Textual references indicate a familiarity with Judeo-Christian scripture.
The Brother and Sister
Although the opening stanza seems to promise that the screaming children upstairs will be the main characters of the narrative, it actually turns out they barely qualify as supporting characters. Within the framework of everything that follows the first stanza, the brother and sister are really little more than the setting. The poem kicks off at exactly 5:00 PM on an unspecified day when the boy starts shrilling and screaming in a high-pitched tone tinged with a metallic aspect of some sort.
When the boy stops, his sister takes over. And this is how it plays out for the most part in a back-and-forth experiment in vocal dissonance. Occasionally, however, the kids will both scream together. It is the primal element of this scream—a sound usually reserved for the release of anxiety or fear, but seemingly without such context in this case—that leads the speaker down the path of metaphysical contemplation that leads from the actual sound of screaming kids to the allusion of howling prehistoric apes.
For most of the next three stanzas, the kids and their screaming become mere specters whose presence hangs over and informs the narrative.
