The Unnamed Narrator

There are really only two characters to speak of in this poem, the main one being the poem's unnamed speaker. Making the assumption that the speaker of the poem is the poet him or herself can cause the reader to come to conclusions that are not actually supported by the poem's content. This assumption can also lead the reader away from valid interpretations that are actually supported by the text. This speaker seems to be very much in love, and he recognizes the differences between the feelings he has had for women before: feelings which seem to have amounted to little beyond lust. He describes how he would desire ""beauty before, and he claims that he "got" what he desired (indicating a certain amount of sexual experience), but now he realizes that his lust and that beauty was a mere dream of the love he would one day feel for his beloved. He speaks, now, directly to her, addressing her upon awakening in the same bed, having spent the night together.

The Narrator's Unnamed Lover

The speaker's unnamed lover is more than just a lover though; she is his beloved. He feels much more deeply about her than he ever has before, so much so that he basically characterizes those lives they lived before finding one another as child's play, of little significance. She is like a new world to him, an exciting and wondrous place for him to explore in myriad ways: emotionally, intellectually, and sexually. The speaker says that the pair of them are like "two [...] hemispheres," and each is free to explore the other without fear or danger. He claims, in fact, that they love each other so much, and so equally, that their love can never die. Just like the hemispheres of the globe, the pair can never be separated.