For this reason the first words of a monologue must usually be delivered slowly and emphatically, if auditors are to be given a clue to the processes of the thought. The inflections and other modulations of the voice in uttering the first words must always directly suggest the connection with what precedes.
"Rabbi Ben Ezra" begins abruptly: "Grow old along with me!" This poem has already been discussed with reference to the necessity of conceiving the listener, but we must also apprehend the thought which the listener has uttered before we can get the speaker's point of view. The young man has, no doubt, expressed pity or regret for the old man's isolation, for the loss of all his friends, and must have remarked something about how gloomy a thing it is to grow old. This is the cause of the older man's outburst of joyous expostulation amounting almost to a rebuke. Now the reader must realize this, must make it appear in the emphasis which he gives to the first words of the Rabbi: that is, he must so render these words as to bring the ideas of the Rabbi in opposition to those of the young man. The antithesis to what has been said or implied gives the keynote of the poem, whether we are interpreting it to another or endeavoring to understand it for ourselves.
We perceive here a striking contrast between the dramatic monologue and the story. The story may begin, "Once upon a time," but the monologue as a part of real life must suggest a direct continuity of thought and also of contact with human beings. Even a play may introduce characters, gradually lead up to a collision, and make emphatic an outbreak of passion, but the monologue must, as a rule, break in at once with the specific answer of a definite character in a living situation to a definite thought which has been uttered by another. The reader must receive an impression of the character at the moment, but in relation to a continuous succession of ideas.
Accordingly, the right starting of the monologue is of vital importance. In a story we often wait a long while for it to unfold. But except in the first preliminary reading, one cannot read on in the monologue, hoping that the meaning will gradually become clear. When a reader fully understands the meaning, he must turn and express this at the very beginning. The very first phrase must be colored by the whole.