Point of View

This poem is written in first-person present tense. The speaker has a distinct perspective and is also the main character in the poem, evidenced by the active use of the first-person personal pronoun “I” throughout the poem (1). It is always necessary to note that, when discussing first-person poetry, readers should not absolutely conflate the speaker, who is a fictional character in a poem, with Richard Lovelace, a real person and the poem’s author. On the other hand, this conception of a poem’s “speaker” as distinct from its author is a relatively modern one, post-dating the composition of this poem by centuries. In the early modern era, poetry was indeed often seen as a direct reflection of its authors ideas or values.

This poem is not autobiographical, however. There does not seem to have been such a person as “Lucasta” in Lovelace’s life...