NOTHIN’ TO SAY
Nothin’ to say, my daughter! Nothin’ at all to say!—
Gyrls that’s in love, I’ve noticed, ginerly has their way!
Yer mother did afore you, when her folks objected to me—
Yit here I am, and here you air; and yer mother—where is she?
You look lots like yer mother: Purty much same in size;
And about the same complected; and favor about the eyes:
Like her, too, about her livin here,—because she couldn’t stay:
It’ll ’most seem like you was dead—like her!—But I hain’t got nothin’ to say!
She left you her little Bible—writ yer name acrost the page—
And left her ear-bobs fer you, ef ever you come of age.
I’ve allus kep’ ’em and gyuarded ’em, but ef yer goin’ away—
Nothin’ to say, my daughter! Nothin’ at all to say!
You don’t rikollect her, I reckon? No; you wasn’t a year old then!
And now yer—how old air you? W’y, child, not “twenty!” When?
And yer nex’ birthday’s in Aprile? and you want to git married that day?
... I wisht yer mother was livin’!—But—I hain’t got nothin’ to say!
Twenty year! and as good a gyrl as parent ever found.
There’s a straw ketched onto yer dress there—I’ll bresh it off—turn round.
(Her mother was jes’ twenty when us two run away!)
Nothin’ to say, my daughter! Nothin’ at all to say!
can be as definitely located as the speaker. To conceal his own tears, the speaker turns or stops and pretends to brush off a straw caught on his daughter’s dress. We have here in this monologue also something unusual, but very suggestive and strictly dramatic,—an aside wherein he evidently turns away from his daughter—
(“Her mother was jes’ twenty when us two run away.”)
Since the daughter is definitely located as listener and the other speeches are spoken to her, this can be given easily as a contrast, as an aside to himself, and a slight turn of the body will serve to emphasize, even as an aside often does in a play, the location of the daughter, and the speaker’s relation to her. The sentiment also serves to emphasize the character of the speaker.
In “Griggsby’s Station” we have a most decided monologue. Who is speaking, and to whom is the monologue addressed? Is the speaker the daughter in a family suddenly grown rich, talking to her mother? The character of the speaker and of the listener must be definitely conceived and carefully suggested in order to give truth to the rendering or even to realize its meaning.
The same is true regarding many of Holman Day’s stories in his “Up in Maine,” and other books. With hardly any exception these are best rendered as monologues.
Many of the poems of Sam Walter Foss and other popular writers of the present are monologues. The homelike characters demand sympathetic listeners, who are, by implication, of the same general type and character as the speaker. Even “The House by the Side of the Road” is better given with the spirit of the monologue. It is too personal, too dramatic, to be turned into a speech.
Again, notice Mrs. Piatt’s “Sometime,” and a dozen examples in Webb’s “Vagrom Verse”; also “With Lead and Line along Varying Shores”; and in Oscar Fay Adams’s “Sicut Patribus,” where you would hardly expect monologues, you find that “At Bay” and “Conrad’s Choir” have the form of monologues.
Many monologues in our popular writers seem at first simple and without the formal and definite construction of those employed by Browning, yet after careful examination we feel that the conception of the monologue has slowly taken possession of our writers, it may be unconsciously, and that the true interpretation of many of the most popular poems demands from the reader a dramatic conception.