Point of View

The point of view in this poem is a close first person present. Because the text is written as a type of argument, it also contains some second person address (where the speaker is talking directly to another character who is listening, who is addressed as “thou”).

However, this perspective is not made explicit immediately. The first few lines of the poem would seem to be written in third person (e.g. “every man is a piece of the continent” is a third person line) (1-2). Though the speaker is the one expressing those ideas, his presence in the text does not become explicitly clear until later on, almost at the end, in line seven.

Through this is an unusual construction in terms of point of view, the author is able to express his ideas in a more apparently detached, factual way. By writing like...