期刊名称：Ka Mate Ka Ora : a New Zealand Journal of Poetry and Poetics
印刷版ISSN：1177-2182
出版年度：2011
卷号：2011
期号：10
出版社：The New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre
摘要：David Mitchell's poetry is full of literary reference. The title of Martin Edmond and Nigel Roberts' selection of Mitchell's poems, Steal Away Boy: Selected Poems of David Mitchell (Auckland UP, 2010), is drawn from the last line of an early poem called 'POEM FOR MY UNBORN SON' which speaks in the voice of Yorick, the jester in Shakespeare's Hamlet, who only appears on stage as a skull in the play. The poem constructs Yorick's dying advice to his son (who is presumably presently in his mother's womb): rather than try to survive in this corrupt world by 'chanting a mime,' better to escape, 'steal away boy.' (Mitchell, Steal, p.48). This poem is unusual in Mitchell's oeuvre for being voiced through a character; being, in other words, a ‘dramatic monologue.’ Typically Mitchell writes from the position of the observer/experiencer/narrator of the events at hand: what has rather too neatly come to be termed ‘the lyric I,’ with a presumed pun on the word ‘I’ – the one who observes (the eye) is the ‘I’ who speaks in the poem and bears a close relationship to the mind of the poet’s self, though autobiographical presumptions can be entirely erroneous. In theory, there is, at least, one intermediate position on the continuum between the ‘dramatic character’ and the ‘lyric I,’ and that is when the poet adopts a more novelistic, third-person narrator’s voice, providing a seemingly objective picture without ventriloquism of voices or commentary from an observing ‘I.’ This intermediate position is sometimes used by Mitchell, for example in such a poem as ‘yellow room’ which I will discuss later. What is important to note now is that the dramatic monologue mode involves a collaborative approach amongst a community of characters in its creation – Yorick speaks to his unborn son, albeit to suggest he 'steal away' from his community, and Yorick, the son and the pregnant mother are also present in the poem’s world. Drama is a collaborative and communal art. A lyric poet writing through that ‘lyric I’ is necessarily without community, except insofar as the poet belongs to a community of poets, past and present, of similar mode and method. The possibility of joining or not joining this community is a question that often preoccupies Mitchell’s poetry.
