# Poetry — Character guide

> Key figures in Poetry by James Joyce.

- [Narrator](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/poetry_11_se/characters/narrator.md): He moves through Joyce's poems as both craftsman and suitor: a Dublin printer who boasts of setting folklore and poets but draws the line at libels on 'Stepmother Erin,' and a first-person voice who walks out by Donnycar
- [Beloved](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/poetry_11_se/characters/beloved.md): She is the 'thou' and 'sweetheart' of the Chamber Music sequence, present in a summer walk, a kiss softer than the wind, and a hand-in-hand wandering through a brown land where love has ended. Her defining tension is abs
- [Love](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/poetry_11_se/characters/love.md): Love appears personified in the early Chamber Music poems, wandering by the river with pale flowers on his mantle and dark leaves in his hair, and later 'making sweet music' in a brown land where two lovers walk hand in 
- [Death](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/poetry_11_se/characters/death.md): Death enters Joyce's poems less as a figure than as a season: winter crying at the door in 'Sleep Now,' grey winds blowing where the narrator goes, and the noise of many waters flowing to and fro. The tension is between 
- [Daughter](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/poetry_11_se/characters/daughter.md): The poet's daughter, recipient of a flower in a brief poem.
- [Rahoon](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/poetry_11_se/characters/rahoon.md): A deceased beloved mourned by a weeping woman in a poem.
- [Weeping Woman](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/poetry_11_se/characters/weeping_woman.md): A woman grieving over Rahoon's grave in a short lyric.
- [Players](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/poetry_11_se/characters/players.md): Ghostly figures seen in a mirror at midnight in a poem.

HTML index: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/poetry_11_se/characters