A Comparison of The Lady of Shallot by Alfred Lord Tennyson, My Last Duchess by Robert Browning, La Belle Dame Sans Merci by Keats and To His Coy Mist

A Comparison of The Lady of Shallot by Alfred Lord Tennyson, My Last Duchess by Robert Browning, La Belle Dame Sans Merci by Keats and To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell

In this essay I am going to compare four poems:

1. The Lady of Shallot- Alfred Lord Tennyson

2. My Last Duchess- Robert Browning

3. La Belle Dame Sans Merci- John Keats

4. To his Coy Mistress - Andrew Marvell

The connecting theme of all the poems is that are all written about a

woman in love or who is loved by someone else. With the exception of

To his Coy Mistress, I would say they are all tragic poems as The Lady

of Shallot and My Last Duchess end in death and La Belle Dame Sans

Merci has a tragic ending too. The poems all discuss the subject of

love. In some of the poems it is written as lust and this brings up

the question of how does one ascertain what love truly is? Do we all

have the same views and ideas about it? The dictionary defines love as

"a deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and a feeling of

intense desire or attraction toward a person. The emotion of sex and

romance…"

From this I can say that all these poets seem to have different views

of love. Browning portrays love as a somewhat detrimental thing in My

Last Duchess. The Duke's view of his wife is that she is too naïve and

candid. Because she is socially inferior to him, he tries to change

the person that she is but this results in her death - "Then the

smiles stopped all together." The poem is too ambiguous, I would say,

to make a decision about whether the Duke ordered her to be killed or

not but metaphorically he did kill her by ordering her to stop being

so nice to ...

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Camelot, Shallot or Lancelot and this always brings the reader back to

the main subject.

My Last Duchess and To his Coy Mistress both use rhyming couplets. It

is a very strict rhyming pattern and it emphasises the strictness and

predictability of the Duke in My Last Duchess and it emphasises the

serious undertone in To his Coy Mistress. It shows that the male

really means what he says even though at times it might sound amusing.

The meaning behind all these poems is really that love is somewhat of

an obscure thing. It is an extremely hard thing to find unrequited

love and once found, if it is ever truly found, it is hard to keep.

For how does one actually define love? Is it possible to define it

properly? These are all questions addressed by the poem and each poem

answers them in the own style of the author.