Point of View

The poem, like the vast majority of sonnets, is written in close first-person point of view. That means that the poem has one single narrator, who is an identifiable character. One thing that is always important to keep in mind in the reading and analysis of poetry written in close first-person is that the speaker is not the same person as the author. It is often easy to conflate the two figures, since the speaker is addressing us in the first person, and may be particularly tempting to do so when an author has a life as colorful as Howard’s. However, it is necessary to maintain a distinction between the two, as we have no way of knowing what, if any, of his personal experiences Howard brought into the poem. The poem might be entirely autobiographical or entirely fictional.

The speaker of this poem...