“The Ecstasy” features two main characters, the speaker and his lover who lay side-by-side along a riverbank, presumably in England around the turn of the seventeenth century. Though we learn a great deal about their souls over the course of the poem, Donne supplies few physical details about the pair. In many ways they function as one single character — or at least the speaker would like us to think of them as one. The main references to them as separate individuals come at the beginning of the poem, when the speaker says they are “one another’s best” (4) and states that when their souls first exited their bodies, they “hung ‘twixt her and me” (16). Aside from these two phrases, every other mention of the characters is to the two of them as a unit.

The first-person plural marks the poem, with the pronoun “we” appearing 18 times...