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“The Lady of Shalott” features an anonymous third-person speaker who recounts the events of the poem from a distanced perspective. In this way, the poem’s speaker is closer in nature to the narrator of a work of fiction. The speaker isn’t directly involved in the action being described, nor does he or she seem to have anything personal at stake in the retelling of the story. For this reason, the speaker might best be thought of as a balladeer—that is, a singer of ballads. Admittedly, “The Lady of Shalott” is a poem and not a song. Despite this technicality, the poem resembles a song in that it has a consistent stanza form with a fairly regular meter. In other words, it has the hallmarks of a poem that could easily be set to music, and indeed it has been. Whether sung or not, though, what’s important is that the poem has musical qualities that complement what is otherwise a narrative composition. In this sense, it fits the basic definition of a ballad, and we may therefore think of its storytelling speaker as a balladeer.

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