Speaker and characters

The most important character in the poem “The Song of the Spectators” by Mary Payne is the collective character of the spectators, which represents the bystander civil society. The historical figures the poem alludes to (Jesus Christ, Joan of Arc or Adolf Eichmann) are relevant only for the way the spectators relate to them.

The speaker

The speaker, or lyrical I, of the poem is part of the collective character of the spectators, yet she is individualised through the personal pronoun “I” (p. 22, l. 6). We can assume the speaker is a ‘she’ because she is probably a lyrical persona of the author, Mary Payne, and because she associates herself with women: “As women, we counted dropped stitches and heads;” (p. 23, l. 1)

Given that the speaker identifies as part of the spectators, she also shares the traits she describes them having. However, we can also sense that she is critical of the bystander attitude because she has chosen to focus on historical atrocities which emphasise the negative consequences of a bystander attitude. Furthermore, she issues a warning in the end of the poem, which suggests that, when the world is going to end, spectators will be partially responsible for it:

But one day, with blank...