Chosen

“Chosen” opens with a wish for death—“Diverne wanted to die” (Line 1)—and ends with a celebration of the life to which she gave birth, that of Pomp Atwood. Dramatic irony is a device in which the speaker—in this case, a third-person omniscient narrator—reveals information contradicting the audience’s knowledge or sense of what is true. In the first stanza, the audience is set up to feel Diverne’s terror and her attempt to harden herself in response to fear by “[killing] part of her heart” (Line 3). The dark misery of “that August night” (Line 1) comes undone after the birth of Pomp—“her life’s one light” (Line 5). By the poem’s final lines, the narrator reveals Diverne has come to see her life as intertwined with that of the man who assaulted her, which would contradict a reader’s understanding of how someone would view their rapist. The narrator also goes as far as to say that the encounter wasn’t rape, despite the conditions—“her raw terror” and “his whip” (Line 14)—that made it so.

Nelson’s use of dramatic irony complicates the reader’s understanding of these encounters between white men and enslaved women.