Who is talking in the poem?

The unnamed speaker and the listener are in a room in
Dover overlooking the English Channel directly across from France. They can see the sea
and the cliffs, and also the moon-blanched land, and can also see a light on the French
coast. They can hear the constantly pounding surf. The speaker’s eye moves from distant
(the sea and the French coast) to near (the English shore), and finally to the room and
to the situation of the two persons in the room. To Sophocles, the speaker says, the
Aegean was a reminder of the “ebb and flow / Of human misery”. By comparing Sophocles’s
thoughts to the present, the speaker suggests the timeless and inevitable unhappiness of
the human condition.