“The Dramatic Monologue is a single speech by a fictional character or an historical figure relating a situation or important moment to a silent audience. The speaker usually reveals aspects of his personality of which he is unaware” (Rozakis 189). The tone of the dramatic monologue is conversational, and we get a real understanding of character. The character speaks, but is controlled by the constraints of the poem.
D. WHY LITERATURE (POETRY) IS IMPORTANT FOR PEOPLE’S LIFE?
Literary works such – as poetry, drama, novels, and so on, have a great influence to peoples’ life. As an example, poetry, in general is a way to say something (Musthafa: 2004). Furthermore Musthafa said that the uniqueness of poetry is that it does not only say something but it also says with a certain quality. The characterizations are among others the beautiful rhythm and rhyme. An interrelated rhythm with our human life experience can be revealed usually by poetry which touches people’s mind. Rhyme as a sound of poetry also relates with human life. It is shown by baby’s babbling and makes the baby satisfy. Rhythm and rhyme construct human natural language and shows the nature of poetry. In pre-literate society, rhythm and rhyme are manifested in a magic formula (Musthafa, 2004).
When people’s life is started with a close relationship with literary works, the beauty and the gentleness of the literary works would help them to think and act at least as gentle as the rhyme and rhythm of poetry. As a student introduced with a literary work for the first time, he may have opportunity to react toward the literary work – say a tale and this will let him give his own opinion or feelings about the message and the people or other characters described in the story.
Story telling is one of effective ways to encourage students to love goodness and hate wickedness (Lestari, 2003). Parents need to encourage students to enjoy listening to stories from books, magazines, and other sources. By doing this they have already plan a seed of reading as a habit. When the students are getting older and they are able to read by themselves, they will then love to read stories as much as they can, because experiencing literary works has approved to be something fun.
However, that is not the whole approach to motivate students having a habit of reading and let literary influence their life. The students need to have an opportunity to share their readings or the stories they have heard as well as their feelings and opinion toward the stories or the readings.
Parents have a responsibility to select the stories and provide their students with appropriate materials so that students would not pick up inappropriate books or any other reading materials. Discussion between parents and students about the content of the readings will also encourage students to think objectively.
Tales, as part of literary works, has its own story grammar. It has a potential power to stimulate students to use their emotion, intelligent, and imagination to learn moral values related to their attitude. The habit of listening to stories or tales, reading them from books or watching them on television (or any other electronic media), is a way to encourage students in developing their language ability and verbal thinking which considered to be very important for their life in the present as well as their future (Musthafa, 2003).
Besides story telling or reading stories activities, poetry reading is also a suitable way to encourage people to experience literary works. The problem is that people usually have already reacted wrongly toward poetry. Rosenblatt (1978) explains that students are more familiar with efferent reading. This kind of reading encourages readers to focus on the reading text, the factual information from the text, without relating the text to the readers’ own experience, feeling, or opinion.
Poetry makes us possible to know “how does it feel” to live in this world. It makes us to be able to answers hard questions in our life and to understand ourselves as well as the value system which is tightly kept in our consciousness. Thus, poetry is our response and evaluation towards our experience with the real world and our opinion towards it. It is a multidimensional quality of experience, a world in which we respond our total sense, emotion, and thought, and its complete form can mobilize the whole soul in an activity. Teachers in general are more familiar with one single correct answer in reading activities (Musthafa, 2004). This is why students feel useless to explore a text from their own experience, and they consequently have less appreciation to literary works, especially poetry with its limited words format.
E. TEACHING POETRY FOR STUDENTS
