The Speaker

The central character of the poem is the speaker. Readers are told relatively little about the speaker aside from the extent and depth of his love for the poem's addressee, his lover. This is critical to the poem's themes, as he emphasizes in the first stanza that he does not know who he was or what he did until he met his lover. He seems to have little existence outside of that relationship, but is completely content in the fact that his identity has merged with hers.

The Beloved

The person to whom the poem is addressed, or the beloved, is even more mysterious than the speaker. In typical Renaissance fashion, the object of the poem receives little exploration outside their relationship to the speaker. Readers are told nothing about this character, even their gender. There is also no information about how they feel about the speaker...