Speaker
Although it would be perfectly natural to expect that a poem titled “Wild Geese” would situate the title fowl as central characters, the geese are directly addressed only twice throughout the entire poem. Neither of these appearances is significant enough to identify them as actual characters. The speaker is really the only character in the poem that can effectively be identified as such, but even then is presented in a way offering little tangible qualities of identification. It is not made clear whether this person is male or female, how old they are, or what they look like. This is not to say that nothing of significance about the speaker is learned, however.
In such cases of relative anonymity, the convention is to assume that the speaker represents a persona of the poet. For the sake of simplicity, therefore, this poem is about a woman directly addressing the reader as “you” with unsolicited advice on how to deal with what one sees as their own personal flaws and failings. After telling the reader that there is no expectations placed upon them to be without sin and that no sin is worthy of overzealous acts of penance, there is the reassurance that one should accept the primal call of nature as the governing rule of what is right and what is wrong. This advice lends a very precise and specific sort of psychology to the speaker: she belongs to the Rousseau school of thought that behaving naturally requires no explanation or forgiveness.
The most intensely direct address to readers asks for a swapping of stories about despair as if recognizing that everybody falls into that state at some point. Notably, however, she doesn’t wait to hear or tell a story of despair, but moves quickly to urge the reader to notice that the world has continued moving. Drawing attention to the sun rising in the sky and the geese flying through the air and the trees, mountains and river stopping for nothing, the speaker reveals herself as something of a trickster. She has asked the reader about their despair only for the purpose of admitting she has been there, too. But she is a true believer in the philosophy that nothing which occurs naturally is either inherently good or bad; it is just natural and to be expected. The speaker is dedicated to passing along her philosophy which equates the onset and exiit of despair in human beings with the urge for the geese to migrate south in the winter and head back north in the summer. The reader may not even know what color hair the speaker has, but by the end of the poem will rest fully assured that this person is never going to commit suicide because that act would be as unnatural as the sun failing to soar westward across the sky every day. And it has become clear that the only possible sin worthy of zealous repentance for the speaker is violating human nature.
