At the
risk of confusing matters, I would suggest a fifth option: "the speaker." The trouble
with "the poetic subject," "the monologic subject," or "the lyrical
subject" is that the noun "subject" implies that the person whose voice the poem
is written in is also the person who the poem is about, but this is not necessarily always the
case. If we take William Blake's poem "London" as an example, the opening line begins,
"I wander thro' each charter'd street," and the poem continues to describe all the
people and the scenes that the "I" of the opening line encounters as he wanders.
However, the poem is not really about the person we can identify as the "I' of the opening
line; rather, it is about the people he meets. Those people, and not the speaker, are the
subjects of the poem. And, therefore, the "I" of the first line is the speaker but not
the subject.
I think "the speaker" quite nicely captures the idea,
too, that poems are meant to be spoken aloud. They are often lyrical and rhythmic and need the
spoken voice to do justice to this lyricism and rhythm.
Another advantage of
using "the speaker" is that the term applies equally well regardless of whether the
poem is written in first, second, or third person. In Ted Hughes's "Bayonet Charge,"
for example, the opening line ("Suddenly he awoke and was running") signals a
third-person narrator. The "he" of that line is the subject, but he is not the
speaker. The speaker is the one telling us about the "he" who
awoke and was running. Likewise, it also works in a poem written in the second person (such as
Andy Weir's "The Egg," which begins, "You were on your way home when you
died"), if we identify the person addressing the "You" as "the
speaker." The "You" in this instance would properly be identified as "the
subject." "The speaker" is the voice that is addressing the
"You."
I hope that the fifth option I've suggested here serves to
clarify rather than confuse matters for you.
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