"Quit, quit, for shame! this will not move, This cannot take her; If of herself she will not love, Nothing can make her: The D--l take her!"
This poem implies a speaker who is laughing at a lover, and both speaker and listener remain distinct. Its rendering seems dramatic. Its jollity and good nature must be strongly emphasized and it must be directly addressed to the lover. It is still lyric, however, because the ideas and feelings are more pronounced than any distinct type of character, in either the speaker or the listener.
The same is true of Michael Drayton's "Come, let us kiss and part." This implies a situation still more dramatic. The characters of the speaker and the listener seem to be brought in immediate contact, revealing not only intense feeling, but something of their peculiarities.
"Since there's no help, come, let us kiss and part; Nay, I have done, you get no more of me; And I am glad, yea, glad with all my heart That thus so cleanly I myself can free; Shake hands for ever, cancel all our vows; And when we meet at any time again, Be it not seen in either of our brows That we one jot of former love retain.-- Now at the last gasp of Love's latest breath, When his pulse failing, passion speechless lies, When Faith is kneeling by his bed of death, And Innocence is closing up his eyes, Now, if thou wouldst, when all have given him over, From death to life thou might'st him yet recover."
Burns's "John Anderson, my Jo" has possibly more of the elements of a monologue. We must conceive the character of an old Scottish wife, enter into sympathy with her love for her "Jo," and fully express this to him. Her love is the theme. Yet it is not the feeling of any lover, but instead, that of an aged wife, a noble, a faithful and loving character of a specific type.
Still, though the poem can be rendered dramatically, in dialect, and with the conception of a specific type of woman, the poet realized the emotion as universal, and the specific picture is furnished only as a kind of objective means of showing the nobleness of love. Some persons, in rendering it, make it so subjective that they represent the woman as talking to a mental picture of her husband, rather than to his actual presence. But it would seem that some dramatic interpretation is necessary. We do not identify ourselves completely with the thought and feeling, but rather with her situation or point of view as the source of the feeling, and certainly it may be rendered with the interest centred in her character.
