The Speaker

There is a specific speaker in the text, likely a figure we can associate with Donne himself. Though the entire text is mediated through the speaker's perspective, it is not until the seventh line that readers are made aware of the explicit perspective. In that seventh line, the word "I" is introduced, with the statement "I am involved in mankind" (7). The speaker thus becomes a character in the poem, a person who stands behind the ideas and philosophies expressed in the poem.

Read out of context from the original prose work, "No Man is an Island" can be read as coming from the perspective of a general "everyman" speaker. However, because the poem was lifted from Donne's Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, in which he contemplated what he thought was his own decline to death, the speaker is generally considered synonymous with Donne himself.

The Reader

The second...