Point of View

The poem is written in first-person point of view, which is important in such an intensely private and personal piece marking the death of the speaker’s loved one. In the third stanza, the speaker outlines the significance that his beloved held for him: “He was my North, my South, my East and West, / My working week and my Sunday rest, / My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song” (9-11). The repetition of the possessive pronoun “my” in these lines constantly reasserts the perspective of the speaker, reminding us that we are being apprised of the speaker’s singular and unique relationship to the deceased loved one. The fact that this relationship was so special to the extent of seeming to dictate the speaker’s experience of time and space also multiplies, for us readers, our sense of the magnitude of the speaker’s loss...