The narrator is a feminized poetic voice attempting to find personal expression outside traditional literary frameworks. She rides public transportation and observes everyday items like medical advertisements or artificial wreaths. Rather than relying on abstract metaphors, she focuses on concrete facts to assert her independence. She takes note of the physical control placed upon her body, referencing a prescribed drug that actively slows the healing of wounds.

An absent figure directly addressed by the narrator, heavily associated with the historical poet John Donne. He relies on complex sentence structures, literary jargon, and extended metaphors to assert authority. His mode of communication functions as an aggressive dialect that obscures simple truths. He fails to locate actual human pain through his rigid methods.

The historical and literary figure addressed in the original seventeenth-century poem. She is forced to stay home while her husband travels, functioning as the fixed foot of a compass in his extended metaphor. Her forced domesticity and silent historical position provide the foundation for the current narrator's perspective.

An unnamed transit worker operating the public bus the narrator uses for transportation. The driver controls the predetermined route the vehicle follows through the city. This rigid schedule limits the narrator's physical movements despite her overall freedom to board the vehicle and travel.

A personified linguistic force representing the rules of language and the broader literary canon. It acts as an aggressive entity that physically assaults the narrator. This hostile behavior demonstrates how established literary devices function as weapons against those trying to speak outside the established dialect.