Speaker or Narrator, and Point of View
Speaker of the poem: unnamed
Point of view: first person
Form and Meter
three stanzas, each a septet, ABABCCC rhyme scheme, mostly iambic pentameter
Metaphors and Similes
The process of "weaning"—literally, of easing a child off its mother's breastmilk—is used metaphorically to depict the speaker and his lover's childlike state in the past. The poet also invokes the concept of "hemispheres" metaphorically, with the speaker positing himself and his love as two halves of one globe. The poem contains no similes.
Alliteration and Assonance
Alliteration: "w" sounds in "Which watch not one another out of fear" and "Were we not weaned till then?"
Assonance: "u" sounds in "sucked on country pleasures" and "i" sounds in "My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears"
Irony
Arguably, Donne's use of religious themes in order to extoll romantic love is an ironic choice, given his historical context, since convention held that love of God was necessarily the "higher" form of love.
Genre
Lyric poetry
Setting
Implicitly, two lovers awakening next to each other.
Tone
Exuberant, introspective, philosophical
Protagonist and Antagonist
Protagonist: the lover (the speaker of the poem)
Major Conflict
The speaker's difficulty reconciling his past existence, before he met his lover, with the profound significance of love to his present life
Climax
Foreshadowing
Understatement
Allusions
"Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers’ den?" Allusion to a Christian parable
Metonymy and Synecdoche
Synecdoche: "our waking souls," where "souls" is used as a stand-in for the speaker and his lover as a whole.
Personification
Hyperbole
"If ever any beauty I did see, / Which I desired, and got, 'twas but a dream of thee": a hyperbolic expression of the power of the speaker's love, which relegates every other experience of beauty or desire he has had to a "dream," i.e., a lesser manifestation of, his lover.
