Monologarhythms: The Speakers and the Spoken

By Bruce Dawe

Vance Palmer once said, “My purpose in writing is to set down Australian rhythms”. I’m sure that to do this is an ambition of many writers including myself. And, perhaps like others, I have often tried to do this without even consciously thinking about it. This is also important at times. In thinking consciously about that process it can become forced and artificial. The individual flow, the rhythms themselves, have to be, in a sense, intuitive, uninterrupted by considerations of this or that. While, of course, most of us write with conscious reflections in mind, somewhere along the road (from the first inklings of an idea to its final realization on the page), still there are times when such reflections would be counter-productive.

But there is a relationship between the two: between the poems which are essentially, a personal monologue and those which are more properly termed “dramatic monologues”. There are also sometimes, poems which have elements of both.

With the monologue, we may be speaking to ourselves or to some other person or entity (God, the nation) who is to take our thoughts and feelings as a true reflection of our state of mind and heart. These forms of monologue are by far the most common. Judith Wright’s Woman to Man is a famous example. So is Les Murray’s The Last Hellos. In Murray’s poem, his reflections on his father’s move towards death are interspersed with direct speech from his father, questions from Les, and the emotional interchange in the process. The rhythms are the abbreviated ones expressive of a countryman’s son mourning already a countryman father. Down to earth, literally and metaphorically. Peter Porter’s An Exequy, so very different in so many ways, is equally personal and equally moving, as is Gwen Harwood’s Mother Who Gave Me Life.

In the English language, we have a great tradition of personal elegies from Ben Jonson through Donne, Dryden, and the Romantics and on to Tennyson’s In Memoriam. But with Tennyson and Browning, we encounter also an interest in the dramatic monologue as such - involving fictional figures. In Browning’s case, we see this in My Last Duchess, where the Duke of Ferrara reveals his sinister aesthetic, and in such other monologues as Andrea del Sarto and The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church. Satirical dramatic monologues appear more often in Browning, while Tennyson draws also upon classical figures such as Ulysses, Tithonus and The Lotus-Eaters.

In the twentieth century, Eliot introduces such figures as Prufrock, the guilt-ridden speaker in Portrait of a Lady, and, in The Waste Land, the various speakers in The Game of Chess section, Tiresias and the fragments of other voices in The Fire Sermon section. For many of us there were also other influences such as those of Kenneth Slessor in Five Bells, and satirical possibilities underlined in such poems as Slessor’s Vesper-Song of the Reverend Samuel Marsden.

The paradoxical nature of a personality such as that of ‘the flogging parson’ has always interested writers, of course. We can see, in such people, ‘ourselves writ large’, and obviously Slessor’s poem pays tribute to this. Moral conscience can tempt us to simplify many complex issues…

The dramatic monologue as a form can appeal to us for a number of obvious reasons. Firstly, it is direct speech; it cuts out the middle-man, the go-between. The distancing conventions are abolished. Like those literary forms which approximate to the thing-in-itself (diaries, journals, such as Lemuel Gulliver’s in Swift’s great satire, a series of letters such as those in Richardson’s Pamela). This is as close as the spoken or printed word can get to the fiction-becoming-fact. The character steps out of the artificial frame of the page just as the romantic hero in the film, The Purple Rose of Cairo, steps out of the cinema-screen to woo the lonely girl.

A second advantage from the point of view of the author is that, if successful, such dramatic monologues pay a compliment to the reader/audience. The author says: Here they are, they are yours; make of them what you will.

A third advantage the dramatic monologue may have for writers is that it can solve one of the major problems we face: how to be aesthetically objective when our feelings are so strongly engaged as to make it unlikely. Suppose a political or social issue, for example, should be preoccupying us. Our first instinct is to dash off a kind of poetic letter to the editor. However, like so many letters to the editor, our letter may be so choked with passion as to be self-defeating.

Drama critics have noted the success of modern Australian one-person plays, which are, of course, dramatic monologues. Stephen Spears’ The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin, Jack Hibberd’s A Stretch of the Imagination, Ron Blair’s The Christian Brothers are all eloquent testimonies to our Australian liking for this form. The poem, as dramatic monologue, has also potentially the same audience.

All speech involves rhythm. The word ‘rhythm’ is from the Greek word for ‘flow’, but it is measured flow. It encompasses metre, stress, pause, and pace. It is, in fact, inseparable from such considerations. While it may have specific identifying characteristics, as in the movements of a rowing crew or a particular waltz, even here there are variables determined by the cox and the composer and interpreted by the music arranger and crew. This interpreting activity we use consciously or unconsciously as we speak. In titling this lecture, Monologarhythms, I was thinking of the extent to which the drive, the impetus of speech-patterns as they develop in a dramatic monologue are of central importance. Lose the rhythm, and you’ve lost the thread through the maze of the experience; instead of Ariadne’s sword, all you have is a tin-opener.

This is especially true when the dramatic monologue is not in a conventional poetic form such as the sonnet. Thomas Drayton’s Elizabethan sonnet, Since there’s no helpe, Edwin Arlington Robinson’s early 20th century sonnet, How Annandale Went Out have a recognizable frame-work of rhyme, metre, and stanza-length (octave, sestet). The completion of a dramatic monologue in sonnet-form may take longer, as formal demands sometimes do, but it is possible to put it down incomplete and take it up again later, since there are clear formal wagon-tracks to follow.

However, what seems an invisible but still real path across the landscape when the dramatic monologue is in free-verse form at first setting-out, may have gone forever once one has left the piece of work and returned to take it up later. At times, this may work to the writer’s advantage, however; knowing how imperative it is to find a clearing in the wilderness by nightfall, an additional creative tension will develop. Two of the dramatic monologues I’ll discuss later do use regular rhyme-schemes, like Slessor’s Vesper-Song.

This is the first time I have put down my thoughts on the value of the dramatic monologue at any length. I didn’t nut it all out before I started writing them myself. Many such influences operate upon us all without our being aware of them.

If I can now take some illustrations of the dramatic monologue from the writer whose work I know best in some respects (that is, myself), I’d like to comment on the relationship I have tried to set up between the speaker of the monologue and what in each case is spoken.

I mentioned earlier the potential advantage this form has for the writer who is deeply involved in an issue and is puzzling how best to deal with it artistically. This is especially the case with social and political issues. The question of capital punishment, for example. While the last public execution in Australia was in 1967, many people still support the principle of capital punishment. I don’t. I wrote this dramatic monologue straight after the hanging of Ronald Ryan in January 1967. The question of Ryan’s guilt is still not beyond reasonable doubt, as Gordon Hawkins’ book, Beyond Reasonable Doubt, makes clear.

The source of this monologue was two-fold. The first was a description by Ron Saw, a Sydney journalist, of the rather weird outfit the hangman wore on that summer morning. The second was a less predictable source. In the British film, Kind Hearts and Coronets, Miles Malleson plays the rôle of the warden in a prison where a prisoner about to be hung is a certain Manzini, a cast-off member of a titled family who has bumped off eight family members standing between him and the inheritance of the dukedom. Before visiting the doomed prisoner, the warden fusses over the correct term of address: “Your Grace? Your Worship? Your Lordship?” In that little vignette in a wonderfully sardonic comedy of the class-system I saw a means of tackling the capital punishment issue. Manners, conventions, customs are means by which the state seeks, at times, to legitimize the illegitimate.

The hangman’s apologetic speech in this monologue (echoing Miles Malleson’s warden in Kind Hearts and Coronets) I also based loosely on the Elizabethan courtly love tradition – hence the title, A Victoria Hangman Tells His Love. In this convention, the frustrated lover is usually dying of unrequited love, and is embarrassed by his situation. In this poem there is a marriage (a matter of life and death), an altar (the scaffold), a public context with the public in ritual attendance, and a lover (the hangman) shamed by his situation.

The speaker here is the State’s representative, caught as people so often are, between whatever human sympathies they may have and their role as public servants. I wrote this poem in one ‘go’ – and when it was published in The Age newspaper, I sent the money to Father Brosnan, chaplain to condemned prisoners at Pentridge. Ryan was buried in quick-lime in the prison grounds.

A Victorian Hangman Tells His Love

While we share fear with all other sentient creatures, courage born of keener self-awareness may define us as human beings. In the hangman poem there is something of this in the reference to “the tranquiliser which I trust / you did not reject out of a stubborn pride” (Ryan did, in fact, reject that palliative to the official conscience).

In this next poem, And a Good Friday Was Had By All, the speaker in the monologue is a Roman centurion (such as the one mentioned in three of the Gospel accounts of the Crucifixion), a centurion who recalls that event. As an archetypal “profile in courage”, Christ’s crucifixion was something that registered with me, as it has with countless others. But the trigger for this monologue came from reading a short play by Ernest Hemingway, called Today is Friday. A group of Roman soldiers are talking admiringly of Christ’s performance in contemporary American lingo as they might of Joe Louis or Cassius Clay (“He was good in there today” etc.). Why not, then, I thought, an Aussie centurion? One caught up in events which, for a secular Roman, would have been akin to those of an irredeemably secular Aussie soldier (or United Nations soldier in the alien cauldrons of Rwanda or Bosnia). As with the hangman, process for the Roman soldier is the only way through the maze of ambiguities. And when he barks out an order at the beginning of the poem he is asserting his authority as one man in a hundred (a centurion) might, if faced with such a problem:

And a Good Friday Was Had By All

In both of these monologues, the speaker’s misgivings are revealed in the act of speaking, although both deal with people treated as criminals in the eyes of the state. Both speakers are public servants, just doing a job. Anyone who has been in a position of relative power (such as a teacher, for instance) knows the feeling: you may like student X, but you’ve still got to fail them. But the dramatic monologue may deal with a leader more significant than a hangman or a centurion. For example, a political leader such as Queensland knew for 20 years.

Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen was the state’s most prominent Christian, although he alienated many fellow-believers by what was seen as his mercilessness with brave people who disagreed with him, like John Sinclair, the environmentalist. I found the Premier a fascinating Tyrannosaurus Rex in a political Jurassic Park. Writing, as we all admit, is a rite of exorcism, a way of dealing with subjects which are bedeviling us.

That the Premier was a person of religious conviction made him (in his own eyes) possessed of evangelical political truth. To some extent he echoes the controversial figure of Slessor’s “flogging parson”, Samuel Marsden. In a dramatic monologue I envisaged him looking down on his kingdom from his city office with messianic fervor: as Christ looked down on Jerusalem. But the Queensland Premier’s fervor was ultimately to lead to his downfall on the Damascus Road to Canberra. Because of the Premier’s rural background, I called this poem, The Vision Splendid.

Having effectively dropped out of Melbourne University at the end of 1954, I worked as a postman, and self-employed gardener until joining the RAAF in 1959. My most enduring experience of nine years service life was recruit-training. And the process of ‘processing’ recruits (while milder than in the so-called ‘senior’ services) still gave me this poem in which metaphor is a critical weapon for pulling civilian assumptions into line with military realities.

In Weapons Training the metaphors used are from the common stock of such language which has its equivalents wherever military training is needed. (Written later, during the Vietnam War, the racist references were obligatory.) As the focus for this process of stripping-down and re-assembling the recruit I chose the machine-gun drill then in use. It is the weapons instructor who is speaking to a squad of new recruits.

Weapons Training

I took up my BA studies again while in the RAAF and was actually studying the unit Far Eastern History when posted to Malaysia. Around this time, I wrote another dramatic monologue prompted by the film version of Pearl Buck’s 1937 novel, The Good Earth. I saw myself as one of those Aussies whose comprehension of mass suffering in a time of famine (depicted in Pearl Buck’s novel and the film) was inevitably limited. Asia was elsewhere in the 50s and early 60s, although we were soon to be reminded that it could come nearer home…

This was part of my imaginative education and I satirized the struggle many of us then had with the process of taking account of that seemingly alien world. A world which is still there, in another form in Aung San Suu Kyi’s Burma (Myanmar), in Darfur, and in Zimbabwe, for example. I envisaged a representative Aussie family man of the ‘Norm’ variety confronted with mass famine in China, as depicted in Pearl Buck’s novel: ‘The Good Earth’. I called this poem The Not-so-good Earth, and the speaker speaks in the rhythms of an Aussie Norm.

There used to be a Sunday afternoon occasion at Wesley Church in Melbourne known as a ‘Pleasant Sunday Afternoon’. This next poem I wrote, using again a male persona (like that of The Not-so-good Earth), but one whose pleasant Sunday afternoon is interrupted by an encyclopaedia salesman who finds his door-to-door selling shaken by this working class family (and their very active and not totally toilet-trained kids). And it’s the father of the family doing the talking to the salesman.

Pleasant Sunday Afternoon

Often we wonder what it would be like to be of the other gender. Even today, the occasion rarely arises to find out. But I was struck by the extent to which a change of hair-colour can appear to change a woman’s personality (or, at least, that’s what those women’s magazines and the stereotypes tell us). Obviously, the dramatic monologue form can deal with such gender-switches in a light-hearted way as well as more seriously. In this poem I imagine myself as a woman crossing the fateful Rubicon which separates the blonde from the brunette. I am still awed by this possibility which every woman can at least entertain. And I wonder how many women do, actually, share a similar sense of awe as the speaker (a woman) in this poem who is saying farewell (in the mirror of her imagination) to those complementary cosmetic accessories like lipstick and make-up. This poem begins with a paraphrase from St Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, hence, its title, First Corinthians at the Cross-roads.

Obsessive characters are where you find them. Once upon a time, backyard fences found them right there, leaning over to impress neighbouring housewives with their verbal power and eloquence. These blow-by-blow accounts of battles invariably won were more common when fences were neither too high or non-existent to lean against – and when older women were more likely to be home all-day.

Again, merely describing such a woman, akin to Orwell’s beefy prole woman in 1984, would be much less fun than to let her speak for herself. She is a cartoon-figure; larger than life in a way – but intended to have a certain monumental stature. At least, that is how I imagined the speaker in this dramatic monologue, Mrs Swipe Speaks Out.

The examples of dramatic monologue I have chosen from my own work were some of the better-known ones, and included particularly assertive speakers (a Roman officer, a weapons instructor, a political leader, an ocker, and a bossy woman). My own interest in dramatic monologues led me to focus on characters where humour could be involved. But the range of possibilities is as wide as you care to make them. At a time when performance poetry has added its strength to the popularity of public readings, the dramatic monologue is clearly one way to go. The speaker of his/her work can then step out of the frame of self and become directly the other.

Of course, such imagined figures often come guilt-laden to their particular rostrum. And with their underlying sense of guilt there is also a need to justify their position. It is in the tension between these related aspects that one possibility of dramatic involvement for the reader/audience exists.

The dramatic monologue, after all, is only one of the many possible modes of poetry, and certainly not the most common, even today. But it can, at times, carry the burden of the writer’s concern with greater flexibility. For once, we may be liberated from writing directly as ourselves, and others may be temporarily liberated from having to read or listen to us (as us). A strategy so mutually beneficial is worth considering in an age when the self is often indulged as if it were a brumby never meant to be bridled.

And speaking of brumbies, consider the potential dramatic monologue material presently on offer in our wide brown land… At one time I thought that human folly was the peculiar prerogative of Queensland politicians – but I can see now that New South Wales can hold its own in this regard. Think how readily your recent Sydney Night of the Iguanas (with apologies to Tennessee Williams) lends itself to farce.

In Pope’s mock-heroic poem, The Rape of the Lock, the lovely Arabella Fermor (called Belinda in the poem) has suffered the gross indignity of having a lock of her hair removed. This caused much ruffling of tempers. Here in Sydney, we saw a similar indignity suffered by a later Belinda, an MP, concerning the request for her and her partner to remove to another table at the Iguanas restaurant. With similar all-round ruffling of tempers!

Oh, how an Aussie Alexander Pope might celebrate the occasion: in a war not in an 18th century drawing-room but in a classy modern restaurant. A restaurant offering such a wealth of dramatic material for exploitation: the Stravinsky-like dance of the waiters, chef, manager, the music of kitchen knives and of rattled plates and pollies, the rich odours of food whetting the greedy palates of the media…

Ladies and gentlemen, surely here, in Iguanagate, is a world waiting to be realized by some “stout Cortez“ (or Balboa, for that matter). And this very evening could be your particular “peak in Darien“, from which we might all view the wide (if not particularly pacific) Pacific!

Let this humble suggestion by my final word in this lecture…