Soliloquy
Quick answer: A soliloquy is a speech in which a character thinks aloud while alone. Learn how it works in drama and poetry, with examples and tips for writing one.
A soliloquy is a speech in which a character, alone or believing themselves alone, speaks their thoughts aloud. The word comes from the Latin solus, alone, and loqui, to speak. Its natural habitat is the stage, where playwrights use it to open a character's skull to the audience, but the device matters to poets too, both because verse drama is poetry and because the soliloquy's conventions shaped how lyric poems perform thinking on the page.
The defining feature is the absence of a listener. Nobody is being persuaded, seduced, or managed, so the speech carries a special claim to honesty: this is the self talking to the self. That claim is also what poets and playwrights love to complicate, since people lie to themselves as fluently as to anyone.
How It Works
A soliloquy dramatises deliberation. It usually begins from a pressure point, a decision, a temptation, a fresh wound, and then thinks in real time: questioning, answering, reversing, resolving. The syntax does the acting, with self-interruptions, rhetorical questions, and turns marked by words like yet, but, and still. Here is an original micro-example of thought staged as speech:
Post it, then. No. Read it once more. / Whoever wrote this was angrier than me, / and yet the sentences are all still true.
The reversals are the drama. Where a dramatic monologue performs for a listener, the soliloquy performs the act of thinking itself.
Where You Will See It
Shakespeare is the master reference: Hamlet weighing existence, Macbeth hallucinating a dagger on the way to murder, Iago rehearsing his plots directly at the audience. Marlowe's Faustus counting down his final hour is among the most harrowing soliloquies in English. Beyond the stage, the soliloquy's DNA runs through poetry that stages solitary thought, from Romantic meditations composed alone at night to modern insomnia poems and self-interrogations. Browning even used the label ironically in 'Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister', where a monk's private venom tells us everything his piety hides.
How to Use It in Your Own Poems
Write from a decision the speaker has not yet made, and forbid yourself a listener: no you, no audience, just the mind pacing its room. Let the poem change direction at least twice, because uninterrupted certainty is a speech, not a soliloquy. Small stage business helps, an object handled, a window looked through, giving thought a body. And allow self-deception; the reader should occasionally see past what the speaker tells themselves. A soliloquy that discovers something mid-poem will always beat one that merely announces a conclusion.
What poets can take from this
- Start from an unresolved decision so the speech has somewhere to go.
- Use questions and reversals; thinking aloud is zigzag, not monologue-straight.
- Keep all other characters and any addressed you out of the poem.
- Give the speaker one physical object or view to return to between thoughts.
- End on a decision, or on the honest failure to reach one, never on a shrug.
Try it yourself
Write a soliloquy in verse for someone standing outside a door they must either knock on or walk away from. Let them reverse their decision at least twice before the final line commits.
Questions
What is the difference between a soliloquy and a monologue?
A monologue is any long speech by one speaker and may address other characters or an implied listener. A soliloquy is specifically spoken alone, with no listener inside the scene, so it represents private thought rather than public speech.
Are soliloquies only found in plays?
Mostly, but not exclusively. The convention comes from drama, especially Elizabethan theatre, yet poets borrow it whenever a poem stages a solitary mind thinking aloud, and some, like Browning, have used the word in poem titles.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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