Hello, Frank Hubeny here and welcome to dVerse’s Meeting the Bar. The challenge today is to use the dramatic literary effect of soliloquy in a poem.

Characters in a drama engage in soliloquies when they say something to themselves, perhaps rationalizing out-loud what they plan to do that the other actors in the play can’t hear or hear well.  The audience, however, hears them and that helps the audience understand better what is going on. It is also called direct address to the audience.

A famous soliloquy is when Hamlet begins speaking “to be or not to be” off to the side. Only the audience can clearly hear what he is saying. In this way, Shakespeare gives the audience inside information.

Poems in general might be considered soliloquies to the reader of the poet’s thoughts. For this prompt one may want to add a dramatic context perhaps as a brief paragraph explaining the scene and then let the poem express one character’s perspective on that context, or perhaps even more than one character’s perspective on the context with multiple soliloquies. 

Or, write a poem where you talk to yourself weighing different alternatives or where you try to find an explanation for something that doesn’t make sense or where you simply express how you feel about something. You are saying this mainly to yourself like an entry in a journal or diary. It is you whom you have to convince.  

Here is how to participate:

Write a poem using soliloquy in some way. It may even be a poem you now see could be interpreted as a soliloquy. Post it to your blog. Copy the link to your blog post. Paste the link into the Mister Linky below with your name. Don’t forget to also link back in your blog post to this page so others can find how they may participate. 

Then sit back (the hard part’s over) and read what others have written for this prompt. Also, if you like, you may leave a comment below.

The Mister Linky will be open for the next 48 hours.