The Speaker and His Companions

The unnamed speaker is never defined as an individual, but instead is – from the outset of the poem – in the company of a companion, or several companions. The poem is written from the perspective of the first-person plural “we” (3), making clear to us the collective nature of the joy he experiences from the peaches. Without the presence of his friends, the speaker would perhaps not have appreciated the peaches as deeply. It is important that the number of people is not exactly defined or known to the reader. Individuality no longer matters when there is such sublime joy to be shared among many. The speaker himself disappears into this “we.”

The use of “we” also suits Lee’s intention of generalizing the experience of wonder to a more abstract and boundless notion of humanity. The “we” in the final stanza (17) could refer to the...