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DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE:
Biographies of the Speakers
The Oak
The Oak, a California Live Oak, Q. agrifolia, is currently approximately three hundred years old. It was germinated in the
Livermore Valley in northern California in an area once occupied by the Ohlone tribe. Still in good health, the Oak is visible just east of Highway 680 between San Jose and Sacramento. The Oak prefers its exact location to remain unclear.
Jesus of Nazareth
Jesus of Nazareth was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the year 1 of the current era. His father, a descendent of King David, was a carpenter. His mother, Mary, was a devout Jewish homemaker. Both parents supervised Jesus’ religious education, making sure that he learned the Hebrew Scriptures. At approximately the age of thirty, through his mother’s encouragement, Jesus began his career as a miracle worker, healer and religious teacher. His charisma and popularity ultimately threatened the leadership of the Sanhedrin, who handed him over to the occupying Roman forces for execution by crucifixion. Three days later, he was resurrected from the dead, one of the few humans in recorded history to have done so.
Because of the extensive documentation and numerous eyewitness accounts, his resurrection and later ascension are considered by many to be authentic. For the past two thousand years, he has had a profound influence on the development of human history, particularly in the areas of art, philosophy, religion and politics.
In his dramatic monologue, we meet him in prayer just before his conversation with Martha described in the Book of Luke.
The Bear
The Bear is a female North American Grizzly, Ursus arctos. She was born in the Potlatch Forest area of northern Idaho near the Elk and Clearwater rivers in the territory occupied by the Nez Perce tribe at the end of their migrations. In her dramatic monologues, she speaks at three different times in her life—just after the birth of her first two cubs, two years later when she is preparing to mate for the second time and just before her death at the old age of fifty.
John the Apostle
John was one of the twelve original apostles of Jesus. Jesus called John and his brother James, sons of Zebedee, along with Peter, to abandon their work as fishermen and follow Him. John is credited with writing the Gospel of John, the three Letters of John and Revelation, though several modern scholars dispute the authenticity of his authorship. John is also frequently identified as “the beloved disciple” to whom Jesus entrusted the care of His mother, the Virgin Mary, shortly before His death by crucifixion. John has the distinction of being the only apostle who was not martyred for his service to Jesus. Tradition says that John lived to a very old age and communicated extensively with the second generation of Christian leaders, designated the “Apostolic Fathers” because they had known and spoken to one of the original twelve apostles.
In his interior monologue, John reflects in old age back on the Transfiguration, a pivotal moment in his relationship with Jesus, shared by Peter and James. This reflection takes place as John is about to be released from prison on the Greek island of Patmos.
St. Anthony of Egypt
Anthony, also known as Anthony the Great, was born in central Egypt around 251 of the current era and lived for 105 years. He is known as the founder of Christian monasticism, living in the desert with a small group of monks who devoted their lives to prayer. He and his followers literally lived the Gospel instruction to “Go, sell all that you have and give to the poor.” Throughout his life, Anthony attempted to imitate Jesus in all of his actions and behaviors. In his free-verse poem, Anthony finds himself in a Wallmart store and tries to make sense of all that he sees and experiences.
Beowulf
Beowulf is a quasi-historical person, the hero of the eponymous Anglo-Saxon poem. This poem, originally oral, is preserved in manuscripts from approximately 750 C.E. Beowulf the poem is classified as an epic by many scholars, but J.R.R. Tolkien, perhaps the greatest of all Beowulf scholars, refers to it as a “heroic-elegaic poem.” In “Beowulf’s Last Boast,” we indeed find Beowulf, a great and hitherto undefeated warrior, in an elegaic mood, reflecting back on his own life and personal values on the night before his death.
He speaks in the four-beat alliterative line with a central caesura in which all Anglo-Saxon poetry is written. His language, which may seem odd to contemporary readers, contains kennings (descriptive compound nouns) and understatements, typical of Anglo-Saxon speech patterns and reflective of the Anglo-Saxon world view.
Sei Shonagon
Japan’s second most famous writer, Sei Shonagon was born in Kyoto some time in the 900s, C.E. Her actual name is unknown. Shonagon is a court title, and Sei refers to her family name, Kiyohara. Her father and her grandfather were well known poets, and she grew up in an aristocratic environment. For a time, she served as a lady in waiting to Empress Teishi, consort of Emperor Ichijo. After the Empress’ death, Shonagon’s own circumstances seem to have declined, and the events surrounding her death are unknown.
Though a prolific tanka poet, Shonagon is best known for her miscellaneous journal, The Pillow Book (Makura no soshi), composed early in the eleventh century. Written in her own voice, this humorous and often critical diary records the daily events of her life in the palace, articulating her highly evolved aesthetic values and sense of decorum.
In her blank verse dramatic monologue, Shonagon finds herself projected a thousand years into the future into a culture which must have seemed grotesquely barbaric to her—the center of the electronics industry in America, Silicon Valley.
Lady Rokujo
Lady Rokujo is a fictitious character in the world’s first and greatest novel, The Tale of Genji, written by Murasaki Shikibu around the year 1,000 C.E. Like Sei Shonagon, with whom she was acquainted, Murasaki was also a lady in waiting in the Imperial Palace in Kyoto, though she served a rival Empress. Murasaki was intimately familiar with the jealousies and intrigue at court, topics which form the background of her novel.
A pivotal character in this profound psychological and spiritual masterpiece is Lady Rokujo, one of the many lovers of the protagonist, Prince Genji. Although Rokujo has over the centuries become an archetype of female jealousy, she appears in very few scenes in The Tale of Genji, and her story is never fully told. In her dramatic monologue written in blank verse, Rokujo speaks for herself at last. All of the characters to which she refers actually appear in The Tale of Genji with the exception of her listener, the Priest of the Temple in the Hills.
Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122?-1204)
Eleanor was the most powerful and influential woman in Europe during her own lifetime. She inherited the duchy of Aquitaine in France in her own right and later established her own court at Poitiers, which became a center for culture, especially music and poetry and the Courtly Love tradition. She was married to two kings successively, Louis VII of France and Henry II of England. Two of her sons, Richard I and John became kings of England.
However, her prominence was not without strife and family conflict. Her husband Henry placed her under house arrest for many years for supporting her sons in their struggle against their father for power and influence. Tired of her husband’s infidelity and murderous behavior, Eleanor found peace in her seclusion. We meet her after her death among the “Cloud of Witnesses,”
observing the poignant contrast between the benign violence of natural phenomena and the evil that lingers for centuries due to human violence and warfare.
St. Catherine of Siena
Catherine of Siena, born Caterina di Giacomo di Benincasa, was born in Siena on March 25, 1347 and died at the age of 33 in Rome on April 29, 1380. She was one of twenty-five children, and her family home in Siena still stands. Catherine is credited with convincing Pope Gregory XI to return the Papacy to Rome after its exile in Avignon, though not all scholars agree that it was Catherine’s influence that brought this event about. Catherine was an interesting combination of mystic, practical traveler and political peacemaker. She experienced a “mystical marriage” to Christ, a vow to which she remained faithful throughout her life as a Third Order Dominican. She also served as Ambassador of Florence, attempting to make peace with the Papal States. She was canonized a saint in the Roman Catholic Church in 1461. In 1970, she was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church along with Teresa of Avila. We meet Catherine shortly before her journey to Avignon. Her listener is her confessor and later biographer, Raymond of Capua, O.P.
Teresa of Avila
Teresa Sanchez de Cepeda y Ahumada was born to an aristocratic family in Avila in the Spanish region of Castile on March 28, 1515. She became a Carmelite nun and reformed the order, for both women and men, to focus on lives of spiritual discipline and contemplation. Teresa was assisted in her controversial reformation efforts by a younger Carmelite priest, John of the Cross (Juan de Yepes y Alvarez, 1542-1591, Canonized 1726.) Teresa’s influence on Spanish literature and Christian theology has been profound. The Interior Castle, her book on mystical prayer and meditation, has become a world classic. Teresa was canonized a saint in 1622 and proclaimed the first female Doctor of the Church in 1970.
Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts, to an affluent and socially prominent family. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was a successful lawyer. Emily was well educated at Amherst Academy and later studied for a year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Raised in the Puritan tradition, Emily was not enthusiastic about attending church services, though she adapted the quatrain form of familiar Christian hymns for many of her poems.
Emily never married. She spent her entire adult life in her father’s household and died at the age of fifty-five. As she grew older, Emily became more and more reclusive, relying on her younger sister Lavinia to care for the household responsibilities while Emily occupied herself with writing poetry.
In her dramatic monologue, Emily, at home as usual, focuses from her idiosyncratic perspective, on the ordinary events of everyday life and death as she bakes gingerbread for a sick neighbor.
Dorothy Wordsworth
Dorothy Wordsworth (1771-1855,) sister of the British romantic poet, William Wordsworth, lived her entire life with her brother, even after he married and had five children. Dorothy cared for his children and household and made her notebooks, filled with observations of nature and human activities, available to her brother. He relied heavily upon these notebooks in composing his poems, including his famous “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” printed below, but he never gave his sister any credit for her contributions to his poetry. In middle age, Dorothy became completely insane and at times violent. She lived into her eighties and was cared for by her brother until his own death five years before hers. Her dramatic monologue, written in blank verse, may give the reader some insight into her mental and emotional breakdown.
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
By William Wordsworth
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay;
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)
Elizabeth Barrett was the most successful female British poet during the Victorian age. She was admired by poets as diverse as Emily Dickinson and William Wordsworth. Her writings included love lyrics and radical feminist themes. Born into a wealthy family, Elizabeth received an excellent private education and was encouraged but also dominated by her authoritarian father, who eventually convinced her that she was too ill to participate in public life. Elizabeth became a semi-invalid recluse. However, when she was nearly forty, she began corresponding with the younger poet Robert Browning, and their relationship transformed her life. The couple eloped to Italy, against her father’s wishes, and lived an active life of love, literature and travel, especially in Italy. Her career flourished during the final five years of her life, as encouraged by her loving husband, she continued to write on feminist and other important social themes, including the abolition of slavery. She died in Florence in her husband’s arms and is buried there. Her poem in this collection, commenting on the artistic values of the Italian Renaissance, continues her radical feminist vision.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Gerard Manley Hopkins was born in Stratford, Essex, in England on July 28, 1844. His parents were affluent Anglican Christians. Gerard attended Oxford University and was converted to Roman Catholicism. His conversion created a painful rift between him and his family. At the age of twenty-two, he became a Jesuit priest. An extreme introvert who often suffered from depression, Gerard was not a successful parish priest. In 1884 he was given the assignment of Professor of Greek at University College, Dublin.
Like Emily Dickinson, Gerard was not a well-known poet during his own lifetime but became famous after his death. He experimented with the Italian sonnet form, adding extra syllables and even extra lines (codas) at the end. He shared these highly unusual poems through correspondence with Robert Bridges, the Poet Laureate of England. Though his poems seemed very odd by Victorian standards, he was heralded in the Twentieth Century as the father of modern poetry. Bridges was responsible for the publication of Hopkins’ poetry in 1918, thirty years after the poet’s death. Many of Hopkins’ poems focus on the wonder and glory of the natural world and the poet’s devotion to God in both joy and sorrow.
In his dramatic monologue, written in sprung rhythm in a loosely constructed sonnet form with two codas, Hopkins finds himself more than one hundred years in the future in a place he never visited during his actual life, Joplin Missouri. Joplin, birthplace of the American poets, Langston Hughes and Rose Anna Higashi, is located in southwestern Missouri, near Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas. Once a lead mining area, and before that, home to the Quapaw and Cherokee tribes, Joplin is now an economically depressed area which is nevertheless a trucking destination on Interstate Highway 44 and old Highway 66. Joplin is locally known as the Gateway to the Ozarks. The city was destroyed in 2011 by a massive tornado and continues the reconstruction process.
The Other Dorothy
Dorothy is a fictitious character in the novel, The Wizard of Oz, written in 1900 by L. Frank Baum. Even better known is the 1939 film version of the story, starring Judy Garland as Dorothy. Dorothy, the child protagonist, is born on a farm in Kansas and raised by her Uncle Henry and Aunt Em. When a tornado hits her family farm, she and her dog Toto are carried to the mythic Land of Oz where, following a yellow brick road, they encounter many adventures along with their companions, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion.
On their archetypal journey to meet the Wizard of Oz, the characters discover their own inner gifts and strengths. Dorothy has become a symbol of American hope and resourcefulness. She brings these characteristics to her dramatic monologue when she is projected one hundred years into the future to San Jose, California, home of Silicon Valley. Her response makes an interesting contrast to Sei Shonagon’s, who also finds herself inadvertently in the birthplace of the computer.
Carl Jung
Carl Gustav Jung, (1875-1961,) was, along with Sigmund Freud, one of the “fathers of modern psychology.” Born in Switzerland and educated as a medical doctor, he became interested in his patients’ spiritual and emotional lives as he tried to heal their physical ailments. His research led him to develop the concepts of the “collective unconscious,” extroversion and introversion and archetypes. He conducted extensive studies on dream analysis and symbolism. These ideas were compiled for the general public in 1964 in Man and His Symbols, a profoundly influential work in the Twentieth Century. Jung himself was deeply religious and wrote voluminously about the spiritual aspects of symbolism in spite of criticism from the scientific community. He based his writings on his vast knowledge of history, art and literature as they apply to the psychological lives of human beings.
In his dramatic monologue, Jung uses this extensive knowledge and the experiences of his own very long life to respond to a student’s comment about “the meaning of life.”
The Oak, a California Live Oak, Q. agrifolia, is currently approximately three hundred years old. It was germinated in the
Livermore Valley in northern California in an area once occupied by the Ohlone tribe. Still in good health, the Oak is visible just east of Highway 680 between San Jose and Sacramento. The Oak prefers its exact location to remain unclear.
Jesus of Nazareth
Jesus of Nazareth was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the year 1 of the current era. His father, a descendent of King David, was a carpenter. His mother, Mary, was a devout Jewish homemaker. Both parents supervised Jesus’ religious education, making sure that he learned the Hebrew Scriptures. At approximately the age of thirty, through his mother’s encouragement, Jesus began his career as a miracle worker, healer and religious teacher. His charisma and popularity ultimately threatened the leadership of the Sanhedrin, who handed him over to the occupying Roman forces for execution by crucifixion. Three days later, he was resurrected from the dead, one of the few humans in recorded history to have done so.
Because of the extensive documentation and numerous eyewitness accounts, his resurrection and later ascension are considered by many to be authentic. For the past two thousand years, he has had a profound influence on the development of human history, particularly in the areas of art, philosophy, religion and politics.
In his dramatic monologue, we meet him in prayer just before his conversation with Martha described in the Book of Luke.
The Bear
The Bear is a female North American Grizzly, Ursus arctos. She was born in the Potlatch Forest area of northern Idaho near the Elk and Clearwater rivers in the territory occupied by the Nez Perce tribe at the end of their migrations. In her dramatic monologues, she speaks at three different times in her life—just after the birth of her first two cubs, two years later when she is preparing to mate for the second time and just before her death at the old age of fifty.
John the Apostle
John was one of the twelve original apostles of Jesus. Jesus called John and his brother James, sons of Zebedee, along with Peter, to abandon their work as fishermen and follow Him. John is credited with writing the Gospel of John, the three Letters of John and Revelation, though several modern scholars dispute the authenticity of his authorship. John is also frequently identified as “the beloved disciple” to whom Jesus entrusted the care of His mother, the Virgin Mary, shortly before His death by crucifixion. John has the distinction of being the only apostle who was not martyred for his service to Jesus. Tradition says that John lived to a very old age and communicated extensively with the second generation of Christian leaders, designated the “Apostolic Fathers” because they had known and spoken to one of the original twelve apostles.
In his interior monologue, John reflects in old age back on the Transfiguration, a pivotal moment in his relationship with Jesus, shared by Peter and James. This reflection takes place as John is about to be released from prison on the Greek island of Patmos.
St. Anthony of Egypt
Anthony, also known as Anthony the Great, was born in central Egypt around 251 of the current era and lived for 105 years. He is known as the founder of Christian monasticism, living in the desert with a small group of monks who devoted their lives to prayer. He and his followers literally lived the Gospel instruction to “Go, sell all that you have and give to the poor.” Throughout his life, Anthony attempted to imitate Jesus in all of his actions and behaviors. In his free-verse poem, Anthony finds himself in a Wallmart store and tries to make sense of all that he sees and experiences.
Beowulf
Beowulf is a quasi-historical person, the hero of the eponymous Anglo-Saxon poem. This poem, originally oral, is preserved in manuscripts from approximately 750 C.E. Beowulf the poem is classified as an epic by many scholars, but J.R.R. Tolkien, perhaps the greatest of all Beowulf scholars, refers to it as a “heroic-elegaic poem.” In “Beowulf’s Last Boast,” we indeed find Beowulf, a great and hitherto undefeated warrior, in an elegaic mood, reflecting back on his own life and personal values on the night before his death.
He speaks in the four-beat alliterative line with a central caesura in which all Anglo-Saxon poetry is written. His language, which may seem odd to contemporary readers, contains kennings (descriptive compound nouns) and understatements, typical of Anglo-Saxon speech patterns and reflective of the Anglo-Saxon world view.
Sei Shonagon
Japan’s second most famous writer, Sei Shonagon was born in Kyoto some time in the 900s, C.E. Her actual name is unknown. Shonagon is a court title, and Sei refers to her family name, Kiyohara. Her father and her grandfather were well known poets, and she grew up in an aristocratic environment. For a time, she served as a lady in waiting to Empress Teishi, consort of Emperor Ichijo. After the Empress’ death, Shonagon’s own circumstances seem to have declined, and the events surrounding her death are unknown.
Though a prolific tanka poet, Shonagon is best known for her miscellaneous journal, The Pillow Book (Makura no soshi), composed early in the eleventh century. Written in her own voice, this humorous and often critical diary records the daily events of her life in the palace, articulating her highly evolved aesthetic values and sense of decorum.
In her blank verse dramatic monologue, Shonagon finds herself projected a thousand years into the future into a culture which must have seemed grotesquely barbaric to her—the center of the electronics industry in America, Silicon Valley.
Lady Rokujo
Lady Rokujo is a fictitious character in the world’s first and greatest novel, The Tale of Genji, written by Murasaki Shikibu around the year 1,000 C.E. Like Sei Shonagon, with whom she was acquainted, Murasaki was also a lady in waiting in the Imperial Palace in Kyoto, though she served a rival Empress. Murasaki was intimately familiar with the jealousies and intrigue at court, topics which form the background of her novel.
A pivotal character in this profound psychological and spiritual masterpiece is Lady Rokujo, one of the many lovers of the protagonist, Prince Genji. Although Rokujo has over the centuries become an archetype of female jealousy, she appears in very few scenes in The Tale of Genji, and her story is never fully told. In her dramatic monologue written in blank verse, Rokujo speaks for herself at last. All of the characters to which she refers actually appear in The Tale of Genji with the exception of her listener, the Priest of the Temple in the Hills.
Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122?-1204)
Eleanor was the most powerful and influential woman in Europe during her own lifetime. She inherited the duchy of Aquitaine in France in her own right and later established her own court at Poitiers, which became a center for culture, especially music and poetry and the Courtly Love tradition. She was married to two kings successively, Louis VII of France and Henry II of England. Two of her sons, Richard I and John became kings of England.
However, her prominence was not without strife and family conflict. Her husband Henry placed her under house arrest for many years for supporting her sons in their struggle against their father for power and influence. Tired of her husband’s infidelity and murderous behavior, Eleanor found peace in her seclusion. We meet her after her death among the “Cloud of Witnesses,”
observing the poignant contrast between the benign violence of natural phenomena and the evil that lingers for centuries due to human violence and warfare.
St. Catherine of Siena
Catherine of Siena, born Caterina di Giacomo di Benincasa, was born in Siena on March 25, 1347 and died at the age of 33 in Rome on April 29, 1380. She was one of twenty-five children, and her family home in Siena still stands. Catherine is credited with convincing Pope Gregory XI to return the Papacy to Rome after its exile in Avignon, though not all scholars agree that it was Catherine’s influence that brought this event about. Catherine was an interesting combination of mystic, practical traveler and political peacemaker. She experienced a “mystical marriage” to Christ, a vow to which she remained faithful throughout her life as a Third Order Dominican. She also served as Ambassador of Florence, attempting to make peace with the Papal States. She was canonized a saint in the Roman Catholic Church in 1461. In 1970, she was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church along with Teresa of Avila. We meet Catherine shortly before her journey to Avignon. Her listener is her confessor and later biographer, Raymond of Capua, O.P.
Teresa of Avila
Teresa Sanchez de Cepeda y Ahumada was born to an aristocratic family in Avila in the Spanish region of Castile on March 28, 1515. She became a Carmelite nun and reformed the order, for both women and men, to focus on lives of spiritual discipline and contemplation. Teresa was assisted in her controversial reformation efforts by a younger Carmelite priest, John of the Cross (Juan de Yepes y Alvarez, 1542-1591, Canonized 1726.) Teresa’s influence on Spanish literature and Christian theology has been profound. The Interior Castle, her book on mystical prayer and meditation, has become a world classic. Teresa was canonized a saint in 1622 and proclaimed the first female Doctor of the Church in 1970.
Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts, to an affluent and socially prominent family. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was a successful lawyer. Emily was well educated at Amherst Academy and later studied for a year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Raised in the Puritan tradition, Emily was not enthusiastic about attending church services, though she adapted the quatrain form of familiar Christian hymns for many of her poems.
Emily never married. She spent her entire adult life in her father’s household and died at the age of fifty-five. As she grew older, Emily became more and more reclusive, relying on her younger sister Lavinia to care for the household responsibilities while Emily occupied herself with writing poetry.
In her dramatic monologue, Emily, at home as usual, focuses from her idiosyncratic perspective, on the ordinary events of everyday life and death as she bakes gingerbread for a sick neighbor.
Dorothy Wordsworth
Dorothy Wordsworth (1771-1855,) sister of the British romantic poet, William Wordsworth, lived her entire life with her brother, even after he married and had five children. Dorothy cared for his children and household and made her notebooks, filled with observations of nature and human activities, available to her brother. He relied heavily upon these notebooks in composing his poems, including his famous “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” printed below, but he never gave his sister any credit for her contributions to his poetry. In middle age, Dorothy became completely insane and at times violent. She lived into her eighties and was cared for by her brother until his own death five years before hers. Her dramatic monologue, written in blank verse, may give the reader some insight into her mental and emotional breakdown.
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
By William Wordsworth
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay;
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)
Elizabeth Barrett was the most successful female British poet during the Victorian age. She was admired by poets as diverse as Emily Dickinson and William Wordsworth. Her writings included love lyrics and radical feminist themes. Born into a wealthy family, Elizabeth received an excellent private education and was encouraged but also dominated by her authoritarian father, who eventually convinced her that she was too ill to participate in public life. Elizabeth became a semi-invalid recluse. However, when she was nearly forty, she began corresponding with the younger poet Robert Browning, and their relationship transformed her life. The couple eloped to Italy, against her father’s wishes, and lived an active life of love, literature and travel, especially in Italy. Her career flourished during the final five years of her life, as encouraged by her loving husband, she continued to write on feminist and other important social themes, including the abolition of slavery. She died in Florence in her husband’s arms and is buried there. Her poem in this collection, commenting on the artistic values of the Italian Renaissance, continues her radical feminist vision.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Gerard Manley Hopkins was born in Stratford, Essex, in England on July 28, 1844. His parents were affluent Anglican Christians. Gerard attended Oxford University and was converted to Roman Catholicism. His conversion created a painful rift between him and his family. At the age of twenty-two, he became a Jesuit priest. An extreme introvert who often suffered from depression, Gerard was not a successful parish priest. In 1884 he was given the assignment of Professor of Greek at University College, Dublin.
Like Emily Dickinson, Gerard was not a well-known poet during his own lifetime but became famous after his death. He experimented with the Italian sonnet form, adding extra syllables and even extra lines (codas) at the end. He shared these highly unusual poems through correspondence with Robert Bridges, the Poet Laureate of England. Though his poems seemed very odd by Victorian standards, he was heralded in the Twentieth Century as the father of modern poetry. Bridges was responsible for the publication of Hopkins’ poetry in 1918, thirty years after the poet’s death. Many of Hopkins’ poems focus on the wonder and glory of the natural world and the poet’s devotion to God in both joy and sorrow.
In his dramatic monologue, written in sprung rhythm in a loosely constructed sonnet form with two codas, Hopkins finds himself more than one hundred years in the future in a place he never visited during his actual life, Joplin Missouri. Joplin, birthplace of the American poets, Langston Hughes and Rose Anna Higashi, is located in southwestern Missouri, near Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas. Once a lead mining area, and before that, home to the Quapaw and Cherokee tribes, Joplin is now an economically depressed area which is nevertheless a trucking destination on Interstate Highway 44 and old Highway 66. Joplin is locally known as the Gateway to the Ozarks. The city was destroyed in 2011 by a massive tornado and continues the reconstruction process.
The Other Dorothy
Dorothy is a fictitious character in the novel, The Wizard of Oz, written in 1900 by L. Frank Baum. Even better known is the 1939 film version of the story, starring Judy Garland as Dorothy. Dorothy, the child protagonist, is born on a farm in Kansas and raised by her Uncle Henry and Aunt Em. When a tornado hits her family farm, she and her dog Toto are carried to the mythic Land of Oz where, following a yellow brick road, they encounter many adventures along with their companions, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion.
On their archetypal journey to meet the Wizard of Oz, the characters discover their own inner gifts and strengths. Dorothy has become a symbol of American hope and resourcefulness. She brings these characteristics to her dramatic monologue when she is projected one hundred years into the future to San Jose, California, home of Silicon Valley. Her response makes an interesting contrast to Sei Shonagon’s, who also finds herself inadvertently in the birthplace of the computer.
Carl Jung
Carl Gustav Jung, (1875-1961,) was, along with Sigmund Freud, one of the “fathers of modern psychology.” Born in Switzerland and educated as a medical doctor, he became interested in his patients’ spiritual and emotional lives as he tried to heal their physical ailments. His research led him to develop the concepts of the “collective unconscious,” extroversion and introversion and archetypes. He conducted extensive studies on dream analysis and symbolism. These ideas were compiled for the general public in 1964 in Man and His Symbols, a profoundly influential work in the Twentieth Century. Jung himself was deeply religious and wrote voluminously about the spiritual aspects of symbolism in spite of criticism from the scientific community. He based his writings on his vast knowledge of history, art and literature as they apply to the psychological lives of human beings.
In his dramatic monologue, Jung uses this extensive knowledge and the experiences of his own very long life to respond to a student’s comment about “the meaning of life.”
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