Point of View

“I Carry Your Heart With Me” is told from a first-person direct address point of view through an unnamed speaker, “i.” The speaker addresses their lover in different terms – “you”, “my dear”, “my sweet”, etc – telling them what their love means to them. The perspective seems straightforward until readers consider the existence of the parentheses that split the poem in two. A type of coupling occurs, as the parts of the poem outside of the parentheses and the parts of the poem inside the parentheses interact with each other.

The parentheses start to confuse the perspective as they suggest that there are two voices in the poem instead of one. Furthermore, the speaker’s language is almost entirely centered on their lover, leaving little to distinguish between the speaker and their addressee. In this way, Cummings uses the form of the poem to dramatize how...