Diction In My Last Duchess

In My Last Duchess, Robert Browning uses voice to create a sinister tone by the use of words he chooses for the Duke of Ferrara to use in his dramatic monologue. The Duke is an arrogant, selfish man who loves the arts. He introduces his deceased wife, as “That’s my last Duchess, painted on the wall,” he says as if he owned her. The Duke was not happy when she participated in things that that he did not provide her with, she didn’t bow down to his aristocratic ways and this displeased him to a great extent. Then nonchalantly, he tells the ambassador that “I gave commands, Then all smiles stopped together.’ This is the dukes sinister way of confessing he had her murdered.

The denotation is generally defined as the literal meaning of a word. The connotation refers to the meaning that is implied by a word apart from the thing that it describes explicitly. Diction is the distinctive tone or tenor of an author’s writings (Literary Devices). In I Wandered

Lonely as a Cloud, the daffodils are used symbolically in the poem. The denotation of the daffodil is that of a yellow flower, growing up I called these buttercups; I’ve heard others refer to them as yellow trumpets. The connotation of the daffodil’s are a crowd people, Wordsworth describes them as “a host of golden daffodils”. He personifies the daffodils by giving them human features
“ When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils
Beside the lake, beneath the trees
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze”
(DiYanni, 2008, pg 519-521 ). I can imagine a group of people dancing around the lake; he uses the reflection of the daffodils to help ease his loneliness.
In the First Death of Nova Scotia, the use of white imagery is that of innocence.

The little girl describes Arthur as being “all white, like a doll that hadn’t been painted yet, Jack Frost had started to paint him” (DiYanni, 2008, pg 525-526). The child views the caskets as “little frosted cakes” (DiYanni, 2008, pg 525-526), these are all references to childlike images. This imagery also sets a cold and dark scene for the reader as well as viewing death through the eyes of a child.

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day; contains many metaphors; Shakespeare compares his love to the beauty of a summers day; “Thou art more lovely and more temperate”. In My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun, he is basically saying that his mistress does not compare to others but he still loves her just the same. For example, “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” and “My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground. And yet, by heaven, I think my love is rare, as any she belied with false compare” (DiYanni, 2008, pg

849).
Sexton’s Her Kind, is written in iambic meter. Iamb is a literary device that can be defined as a foot containing unaccented and short syllables followed by a long and accented syllable in a single line of a poem. Iambic tetrameter is when there are four iambs per line. Some lines in this poem have different syllables; this is what helps the poem flow (Literary Devices). Sexton also uses caesura, which causes the reader to take a pause mid-line while the enjambment forces the reader to read on to the next line. This process causes the reader to read with increasing speed and more anticipation.
In I Too by Langston Hughes uses different forms of accent to show self-pride in this poem. To emphasize his words of self pride Hughes uses a rotation of trochees and dactyls. Trochees, a foot with two syllables (Dictionary) and dactyls, a foot of three syllables, one long followed by two short and one stressed followed by two unstressed in accentual meter.