My Last Duchess

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Throughout ‘My Last Duchess’, the Duke is portrayed by Browning as a domineering figure who has an obsession with controlling and manipulating others. One way the Duke tries to assert his dominance is by controlling the rhythm of speech. The poem is written in iambic pentameter but the Duke constantly distorts it with caesurae. In the beginning of the poem, the Duke calls ‘That piece a wonder, now’, where the comma before ‘now’ breaks up the rhythm and allows the Duke to control that line. The break also exposes that the painting is laced with a sinister meaning of how his ‘Last’ Duchess was only right in the Duke’s eyes after she died, especially when he had her confined to a two-dimensional portrait and she was unable to speak or move freely …show more content…

It is clear to the reader that despite the fact there seems to be a very intimate relationship between them and that the narrator is deeply in love, there remains a subtle hint of tension. Indeed, the narrator is only ‘Happy and proud’ when he realises that Porphyria ‘worshipped’ him too. Furthermore, Browning hints that not everything is harmonious in this relationship when the narrator states that he worries Porphyria is ‘Too weak, for all her heart’s endeavour, / To set its struggling passion free / From pride, and vainer ties dissever’. This reveals to us that the narrator is apprehensive about whether Porphyria is strong enough to break through the ‘ties’ of society, which would have dictated that because of their differences in social class, she could not be with him. His need to control Porphyria becomes evident when he states ‘That moment she was mine, mine, fair, / Perfectly pure and good’. The use of repetition on the possessive word ‘mine’, accentuates his obsession to control Porphyria whilst reflecting the sentiments of the Duke from ‘My Last Duchess’. The narrator decides to take his obsession even further and just like the Duke, he makes the grim decision to kill Porphyria. He believes that this is the only way in which they will be together forever, revealing to us how deluded he is. When the Duke states ‘Only, this time my shoulder bore / Her head, which droops upon it still’, we realise that the role of control has changed from Porphyria, because of her superior social status, to the narrator, as he has killed her and eternally sealed her as an object to

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