The speaker doesn’t offer much information about themself. As such, we don’t know anything their age, gender, class, or racial identity. But we do know three important things about the speaker. First, we know they are a poet, which they state more or less explicitly when they claim, “Poems are made by fools like me” (line 11). Second, we know that the speaker has a reverent attitude toward the natural world. These two aspects exist in a relationship of tension, such that the speaker’s admiration for poetry is not equal to their admiration for nature. This inequality is what spurs the speaker to make what might otherwise seem like an odd comparison between a poem and a tree. Yet it is through this comparison that we learn a third thing about the speaker, and this one is the most important of all. That is, we learn that the speaker is a person of faith who believes in God. Their religious faith is what finally explains their unequal regard for poems and trees. What makes trees so especially lovely is that they, like the speaker themself, are part of God’s Creation. Poems, by contrast, are merely the haphazard creations of “fools like me.”

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