Because the lyric poem so often speaks in a first-person voice, we unconsciously expect to hear in its lines someone saying, “No, I am that I am” (Shakespeare) or “I wandered lonely as a cloud” (Wordsworth), or “I too dislike it” (Marianne Moore) or “Black like me” (Langston Hughes). Wallace Stevens sometimes writes poems of this openly personal sort: “

But Stevens' use of the naked first-person voice is relatively rare. The most frequent substitute in lyric for the first-person singular is the first-person plural: “Like as the waves make toward the pebbled shore, / So do our minutes hasten to their end” (Shakespeare); “Oh joy, that in our embers / Is something that doth live” (Wordsworth); “We outgrow love, like other things” (Emily Dickinson). Stevens is much attached to this first-person plural voicing, which serves him, as it has many poets, as a philosophic resource in asserting something true of all human beings:

But the capacious pronoun “we” can equally serve Stevens as the sign of collective American reference - “Deer walk upon our mountains” (56) - or as the sign of intimacy between two people - “Only we two are one” (118) - or as an indirect way of speaking of himself: “If sex were all, then every trembling hand / Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words” (14).