Point of View

This poem takes an atypical approach to point of view. It is only nominally in the first-person. The speaker gives only one indication of his own presence in the poem, through the use of the first-person plural possessive “our fathers” in line four. Otherwise, the speaker’s perspective does not appear at all in the poem. Instead, the perspective focuses on second-person address.

This can be seen through the poem’s frequent use of the pronoun set “thou/thee/thy.” Archaic today, this more intimate form of the second person was in frequent use in the seventeenth century. It was used only to speak to a single person (while “you” would have been used for groups, to address a social superior, or for politeness to strangers). “Thou” was the form used to address servants and children, animals (except for horses), and intimates, like one’s...