Point of View

The poem is written in first-person point of view, but the important thing to note is that it is not first-person singular but first-person plural. There is no mention of any “I” in the poem, only a “we” (3). The grammatical plurality aligns with the collectivity of the experience captured in the poem, where individuality does not matter as much as what is shared between the speaker and his companion(s). Another feature of the use of perspective in this poem is the absence of individual definition. We do not get any sense in the poem of the number of people present in the scene, eating the peaches, further reinforcing the idea of boundaries being overcome through a shared experience of joy. Just as the consuming of peaches causes their “inside” (11) to turn into “an orchard” (12), blurring the borders between interior and exterior existence, the speaker...