Is dramatic persona one of the main features in Gwendolyn Brooks' poem "The Mother?"

In order to understand Gwendolyn Brooks' part in her poem
entitled, "The Mother," one must understand what "dramatic persona" actually
is.

Dr. L. Kip Wheeler provides a definition of the
"persona" which is:

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An external representation of oneself which might
or might not accurately reflect one's inner self, or an external representation of
oneself that might be largely accurate, but involves exaggerating certain
characteristics and minimizing
others.

Dr. Wheeler proceeds
to define the poetic
speaker:

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The narrative or elegiac voice in a poem (such as
a sonnet, ode, or lyric) that speaks of his or her situation or feelings. It is a
convention in poetry that the speaker is not the same individual as
the historical author of the
poem.

The website of the
University of North Caroline at Pembroke goes on to
explain:

In
literature, the persona is the narrator, or the storyteller, of a literary work created
by the author...the persona is not the author, but the author’s creation--the voice
“through which the author speaks.” It could be a character in the work, or a fabricated
onlooker, relaying the sequence of events in a
narrative.

Merriam-Webster
states that dramatic defined means:

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...striking in appearance or
effect

With this information
in mind, it would seem that Gwendolyn Brooks does adopt another persona to look into the
thoughts and heart of a woman who has ended the lives of her conceived babies through
abortion.

"Dramatic" in this case does not refer to
something occurring in a drama or play, but the manner in which the
text is delivered: in this case, most definitely with the hope of eliciting a specific
effect in the reader—the sorrow and regret of the lives of babies she never brought into
this world, the shared moments between mother and child that they never knew, and the
opportunities at things both great and small, that each child never
knew.

The poem has a tragic and sad mood, especially as the
mother in the poem professes that she loved each
baby.

There is dramatic persona at the center of this poem,
as Gwendolyn Brooks brings to the reader's attention all that is irretrievably lost when
a baby is aborted, and how that loss can, in effect, haunt the mother of that lost
child.