Ohio Impromptu

Background >

Structure

The drama begins with one ‘last attempt’ to exorcise the torment which has characterised a man’s existence since he rejected first ‘a dear one’, and then, all warning against attempting ‘to obtain relief’ alone.

The memory of the ‘dear one’ had surfaced in the forlorn darkness of one night and ‘from time to time’ has returned ‘to comfort’ him. His Listener, however, with his knocking, attempts to regulate what ‘little is left to tell’ of the sad tale of his heart and of how he had since sought, in vain, to escape his loss. Haunted by an inescapable knowledge of past existence, his mind finally attempts to end its torment by making the present reading a final one.

With the terror and suffering revisited this ‘one last time’, however, and with ‘nothing left to tell’, the present offers only a confrontation with the realisation that (his) continuing human existence means just sitting on, as comfortless, meaningless, redundant and inert as deathly cold stone.