Prompt: Dramatic Monologue

Robert Browning, a prominent Victorian poet, was known for his innovative use of dramatic monologue as a poetry technique. Dramatic monologue involves a speaker addressing a silent listener or audience, revealing their thoughts, emotions, and often providing insights into their character or situation. Browning's dramatic monologues are psychological and, ironic, and explore complex human motivations and behavior. But Browning is not read much today other than some of the anthologized poems such as "My Last Duchess," and "Fra Lippo Lippi."

I remember a college class about dramatic monologues that used T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." It was a poem I loved and I went deep into the Eliot poems.

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit...

These days I find Eliot less accessible than I prefer in poetry. For examples of the dramatic monologues, from more contemporary poets, I will point to a few poems.

In Judith Wright's "Eve To Her Daughters," she talks to her daughters about Adam's fall .Eve, talks to her daughters of her and Adam’s fall from Eden and his quest to become god-like, outlining his arrogance, but Eve stays submissive and loyal to him despite his flaws.

Eurydice, the mythological wife of Orpheus, speaks in the poem by H.D. with that name.

And Carol Ann Duffy's collection, The World’s Wife, presents stories, myths, fairy tales and characters in Western culture from the point of view of women, very often giving voice to the hitherto unsung women close to famous men. One of those poems is "Medusa."

A suspicion, a doubt, a jealousy
grew in my mind,
which turned the hairs on my head to filthy snakes
as though my thoughts
hissed and spat on my scalp.

"The Angel with the Broken Wing" by Dana Gioia is the our model this month. It is a poem that I tore out of a copy of POETRY magazine 14 years ago and came across in a file folder this month. This dramatic monologue is spoken by a wooden statue carved by a Mexican folk artist. The poem is about the statue's history and its fate as a museum piece. The poem uses irony to convey that the angel with the broken wing is not actually an angel, but a statue of an angel. There is also irony in that its wing was broken by soldiers during the Revolution who were, perhaps, sparing the rest of the angel out of fear of God. "They hit me once—almost apologetically. / For even the godless feel something in a church."

For our next issue, we are looking for dramatic monologues. Your speaker - famous, mythological or even from your life, but not "you" - addresses a silent listener or audience. In the classic sense, the poem reveals their thoughts and emotions in a psychological, often ironic, way to give the reader some insight into human motivations and behavior.

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