Hart has degrees in English and creative writing and is a freelance writer and author of several books. In this essay, Hart studies the subtle way Behn exposes her emotions in "Ten Years after Your Deliberate Drowning."

Behn's poem "Ten Years after Your Deliberate Drowning," given the poet's focused subject of suicide, could have been, at its worse, a melodramatic rendering. There is material in this poem, such as a vivid image of a corpse, which could have justified an overflow of sobbing phrases. But Behn did not allow that to happen. Maybe it was the ten-year lapse between the actual event and the writing of the poem that provided her the needed objectivity, the space and time to remove herself from personal saturation of her emotions. Nonetheless, the emotions are still evident, and possibly they are even more intense in her silence. The purpose of this...