Point of View

Donne use a first-person present-tense perspective. The primary purpose of the first-person present-tense point of view is that it creates a sense of both urgency and intimacy. By narrating the poem as though it were taking place while it is being read, it seems more urgent. The reader is not just being invited in to experience the speaker’s reflections and ideas, they are actually joining the speaker in the unfolding of the poem’s events. The first person perspective, meanwhile, is useful because of the sense of closeness it creates between the poem and the poem’s reader. The fact that the poem is narrated from the perspective of a speaker who speaks as though the poem’s events were happening to him asks the reader to treat the poem as a sort of confession, or at least a personal disclosure.

The use of...