The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. This poem is taken from Duffy’s collection The World’s Wife. What would it be like to have the Gorgon Medusa’s powers, from Greek mythology – to be able to turn things to stone when they merely glance at you? Here we get a ginger cat transformed into a brick, a pig turned into a boulder, and much else – before Perseus, addressed by Medusa in the final stanzas, arrives with his cunning mirror-shield to deliver Medusa’s comeuppance. Wright manages to weave in anti-war sentiments, feminist ideas, and some clever Biblical jokes, as Eve addresses her daughters and maintains, ‘It was not I who began it.’ This dramatic monologue sees the Biblical Eve transported to a post-nuclear landscape where man has succeeded in destroying the Edenic paradise of the world as we know it. What does Defoe’s character have left, after his life of adventure and toil? The poem is an interesting example of a female poet taking on a male character’s persona and re-examining it: the Crusoe we encounter is altogether more ‘modern’ and introspective than the depiction in Defoe’s novel over two centuries before.ħ. This dramatic monologue from the twentieth-century American poet Elizabeth Bishop imagines Robinson Crusoe looking back on his life, after he’s been rescued from his island and has returned to England as an older man.
Writers of dramatic monologues haven’t just drawn on myth sometimes they’ve taken their inspiration from existing literary characters. saw the feminist potential for such a story, and here gives Eurydice a voice, as she accuses her husband of thwarting her chances at life. Orpheus can’t wait, and looks back at Eurydice before she’s clear of the Underworld, and as a result she is destined to remain in Hades forever. Orpheus travels to Hades to ask that Eurydice be returned to the land of the living, and Hades grants his wish, on condition that Orpheus doesn’t look back at his wife as they leave the Underworld. lost her brother and her marriage to Richard Aldington began to fail (their first child was also stillborn in 1915), ‘Eurydice’ is about the myth involving a woman sent to the Underworld. Written during the First World War when H. (1886-1961), the poem clearly had its origins in Doolittle’s own life. Although this is a dramatic monologue spoken by the wife of Orpheus – the musician from Greek mythology – like many of the poems of Hilda Doolittle or H. Many of the greatest examples of dramatic monologues in the twentieth century were written by women.
Prufrock, a middle-aged balding man who feels uncomfortable attending social gatherings while he ponders some ‘overwhelming question’, makes us laugh but also invites our pity and communal sympathy for his feeling of ‘not fitting in’.