The speaker is a solitary, contemplative individual who remains in the country churchyard long after the local farmers return home. Instead of focusing on the famous or wealthy, he spends the evening meditating on the lives of the uneducated, lower-class people buried beneath his feet. He possesses a strong sense of empathy and eventually turns his thoughts toward his own mortality, wondering how he will be remembered after he passes.

The forefathers are the deceased, lower-class villagers buried in the country churchyard. During their lives, they were agrarian workers who harvested crops, drove teams of work animals, and returned home to the warmth of their families. They lack the elaborate memorials of the wealthy, resting instead beneath crude tombstones with simple, uncouth rhymes.

The swain is an old, white-haired shepherd who lives and works in the rural countryside. Though uneducated and illiterate, he is highly observant of his surroundings and the people within them. He tracks the speaker's daily routines, noticing when the poet walks through the dewy grass or rests at the foot of a nodding beech tree.

The kindred spirit is an imagined future visitor to the cemetery who shares the speaker's melancholic and reflective disposition. Led by lonely contemplation, this person seeks out the history of the graveyard. Because the local swain cannot read, the kindred spirit acts as the literate audience who ultimately reads the speaker's epitaph.