The speaker of “i carry your heart with me” doesn’t reveal any concrete details about their identity. This means that we have no idea about their gender, age, racial identity, or class background. The only thing we know for sure is that they are in love. Although the speaker doesn’t reveal much more about themself directly, the astute reader can make some key inferences about them. For one thing, we know the speaker has a deep familiarity with the key tropes of romantic poetry. The fact that they use such well-worn images and symbols as the heart, as well as suns, moons, and stars, strongly suggests that they have immersed themself in the tradition of romantic verse. That said, despite the speaker’s very conventional choices of imagery, they make very unconventional use of grammar, syntax, and spacing. The choice to remove spaces before and after punctuation alone indicates that the speaker has a somewhat idiosyncratic take on traditional love poetry. The speaker’s oddities of phrasing and punctuation may be interpreted as a form of vulnerability. It’s as though they are willing to put their idiosyncrasies on full display, implicitly asking their beloved to accept them precisely as they are.

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