Point of View

Cavendish described this collection as “Poems and Fancies,” introducing some ambivalence about its genre. This poem, like many in the collection, functions as much as a miniature philosophical essay as it does a work of poetic self-expression. One notably “unpoetic” aspect of the poem is its point of view, or, rather, its lack thereof.

The vast majority of English poems are written in the first-person present-tense. Technically, this poem is too. It uses present-tense verb forms, indicating the poem’s events are taking place as they are being described. However, rather than using the first-person pronoun set “I/me/myself” to indicate the presence of a single speaker whose perspective shapes the poem, Cavendish relies exclusively on the second-person plural: the pronouns we, our, and ours. Even then, these terms appear only in the building metaphor of lines 5-10. For the most part, this is...