Plays and Lyrics — Key Ideas to Explore

Dramatic Monologues and Biblical Voices

The lyric section titled “Dramatic” includes poems spoken by figures such as Jael, Mary at Nazareth, and a blind speaker. These pieces adopt a first-person voice that is often defiant or sorrowful. In “Jael,” the speaker recounts driving a tent-pin through Sisera's temple with a tone of grim satisfaction, while “Mary at Nazareth” presents a mother's quiet bewilderment at her son's destiny. “From One Blind” uses sensory deprivation to explore inner vision: the speaker claims to “see” through touch and memory, a motif that recurs in later nature poems. Rice avoids sentimentalizing these figures; instead, he emphasizes their psychological isolation and moral ambiguity.

Nature as Cosmic Agitation

Several non-dramatic lyrics personify natural forces as turbulent, almost vengeful entities. In “To the Sea,” the ocean is described as “enraged” and “labouring with the drifting bones of countless dead,” an alchemist grinding rocks into sand. The speaker admits loving the sea “above all fear,” trusting that its “runes” might reveal immortality. Similarly, “The Day-Moon” portrays the moon as a “Circe” diminished in daylight, yet still exerting a mysterious pull on tides and human hearts. These poems share a vocabulary of “seething,” “tempestuous,” and “unfathomed moan,” suggesting a universe indifferent to human scale.

Recurring Contrasts: Pagan Vitality vs. Christian Melancholy

Throughout the collection, Rice juxtaposes pagan imagery with Christian symbolism. In “The Dead Gods,” the speaker imagines lying in Oblivion for ten thousand years, hearing a god whisper that they are “king and queen of Tartarus no more.” The poem ends with a vision of withered scepters and faded thrones. Conversely, “The Empty Cross” and “The Atoner” invoke Christian redemption but often in a tone of doubt or exhaustion. This tension is most explicit in “To a Singing Warbler,” where the bird's carefree song of “Beauty! all—all—is beauty!” is met with the poet's warning: “Wait till the winter comes!” The lyric refuses to resolve the conflict, leaving the reader suspended between celebration and foreboding.

Readers approaching Plays and Lyrics should attend to the way Rice uses verse form to modulate tone: the play's blank verse gives way to varied lyric meters, from sonnets to irregular stanzas. The collection rewards those who trace its recurring motifs—blindness, the sea, dead gods—across different genres. The 1906 edition, dedicated to Ida M. Tarbell, gathers work from earlier volumes and new compositions, making it a useful entry point into Rice's early twentieth-century poetic sensibility.

Reading Plays and Lyrics, I found myself back on my grandmother’s porch, sun-warm pages smelling of dust and sea. That same ache lives in Lords and Lovers, and Other Dramas — Key Ideas to Explore, which once made me pause mid-sentence, feeling the pagan light fade into something quieter and older—like dusk settling, not ending, over a familiar shore.