Point of View

This poem is written in the first person point-of-view. That is, the speaker is a character in the poem, narrating from his own perspective with the pronoun “I.” However, the poem primarily uses the second person in its text. Most of the lines are written as dialogue from the speaker to his lover, Corinna.

It is not unusual for a poem to spend the bulk of its length addressing another character in the second-person. However, this poem makes unusually little use of the first person for a poem that is nominally written in that perspective. For the first four stanzas, only one word indicates the first-person: “my,” used exclusively in the phrase “my Corinna” (29, 42). This one small word introduces the speaker as a character in the poem and establishes for the reader that he has an existing relationship with Corinna, enough that he feels he...