Dramatic Monologue of Rita Dove Essay Example

turn to a comparison of the four poems. The first poem to be discussed is Rita Dove’s “The House Slave. In this five-stanza poem, the speaker, a house slave, conveys an immeasurable sense of loneliness and despair. Dove uses simple lines and common diction (including the slang “Massa” [Dove, 7]) to bestow realism to her character. There is a sympathetic and sensitive, but ultimately helpless quality to the speaker’s voice. She observes field slaves begin their day, as “the first horn lifts its arm over dew-lit grass” (Dove, 1). The personification transforms the horn into far more than a benign wake-up call - it is a reaching arm to force them awake from the safety of sleep and into the beginnings of another laborious day.

The phrase “I watch them driven into the vague before dawn” (Dove, 5) brings forth images of the slaves being treated like livestock, and suggests the speaker’s frustration and lack of power over the dehumanizing treatment the slaves received from their masters. The reader is left with the impression that this speaker feels the injustice of slavery two-fold, as she not only suffers her own burdens as a house slave, but also shares in the suffering of the field slaves: ”the whip curls across the backs of the laggards- sometimes my sister’s voice, unmistaken, among them. ”Oh! Pray,” she cries, “Oh!

Pray! ” Those days I lie on my cot, shivering in the early heat” (Dove, 9-12). The tragedy of this poem and the despair of the speaker culminate in the last line of the poem, “I weep. It is not yet daylight” (Dove, 15), as all this anguish is

what she must endure before daylight. Turning now to the next poem, Seamus Heaney’s “Requiem for the Croppies,”the speaker is a “Croppie’ (a rebel of the Irish resistance of 1798 [Heaney]). Heaney uses simple speech that would have been a common parlance to that region of Ireland, which makes the speaker’s voice a realistic one suited to the poem’s time frame.

The speaker has a lost and rather tragic voice, as emphasized in the lines, “No kitchens on the run, no striking camp - / we moved quick and sudden in our own country” (Heaney). These lines contribute a sense of loss and displacement, even within the croppies own country, and the use of words such as “run,” “quick,” and “sudden” convey a sense of haste and distress. The doomed fate of the Croppies, their “fatal conclave” (Heaney), is portrayed as less significant than the historical importance of their actions, as they planted the “seeds of violent resistance” (Heaney, footnote).

This significance is evident in the last two lines, “They buried us without shroud or coffin / and in August the barley grew up out of the grave” (Heaney). The Croppie, although buried in a way that suggests lack of respect and esteem, views their sacrifice as a necessary one important to Ireland’s future. The third poem, “The Czar’s Last Christmas Letter: A Barn in the Urals” Is written by Norman Dubie in the simple diction and direct approach of a son’s letter to his mother “which transforms the distant Czar into a sympathetic, doomed figure with a confused and despairing voice.

The first eleven stanzas are devoted entirely to memories of the past, which

serve as a contrast between his past life as a Czar and his current life as a prisoner, “no longer Czar” (Dubie 834). Nicholas remarks that his wife washed “all of her legs / right in front of the children. I think / We became sad at her beauty” (Dubie 834). This description of a simple, humble thing contrasts their past from their present, but also demonstrates the despondency in his voice and the melancholy mood that is pervasive in his lines.