How Does Elizabeth Barrett Browning Use A Dramatic Monologue

947 Words2 Pages

Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning both use a dramatic monologue as a poetical device to capture a reader’s attention and subvert the status quo of political notions that they rail against in order to achieve their ideals of race, gender, and class equality. However, their approach in utilizing dramatic monologue to achieve this goal is substantially different. The differences of tone and context of the dramatic monologue are vividly showcased in the contrast of Barrett’s “The Cry of the Children” and “Robert’s “My Last Duchess.”
In Robert’s “My Last Duchess,” the inner-workings of a “noble” man’s (hereafter called, “Ferrara”) mind sets the poem’s tone. The subversion of the reader happens through the framing of the narrative around …show more content…

Additionally, she depicts this by saying, “young birds” and “young flowers” in stanza one as juxtaposed with stanza two’s “old tree” and this also induces sympathy for the children’s loss of childhood. This is a clever tactic that Barrett weaves into her poem because men have constantly tried to ascertain feelings and thoughts in comparison with nature. In addition, Barrett’s ability to turn this notion on its head and redirect the reader’s attention to real life tragedies works in quid pro quo fashion similar to Robert in “My Last Duchess,” i.e., if nature is free, then so must children be free. Additionally, Barrett’s poem is unique in form as well when contrasting these two particular poems. Robert’s poem is fairly straightforward, as it consists of twenty-eight couplets whereby he uses consonance to a degree as well as punctuation to indicate accented words. In Barrett’s poem, the rhyme scheme is significantly more complex than that of Robert’s. There are thirteen stanzas which all begin and end with a quatrain rhyme scheme with the anomaly in stanza twelve. In addition, Barrett’s em dashes, exclamations, enjambments, italics are all used to emphasize the words of her choosing. All of which are used in a vast amount and create a sense of power in the voice of the author, which further distinguishes her

Open Document