My Last Duchess Analysis

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Robert Browning’s My Last Duchess reveals the story of a duke’s negotiation with a servant for the hand of a count’s daughter. As the duke attempts to paint an inaccurate picture of himself as a loving and caring husband, he instead shows what a psychopathic, manipulative and jealous man he can be by describing the “disrespectful” acts of his former wife that led him to her murder. Mr. Browning carefully constructs his poem’s most distinctive attribute, the duke’s controlling nature, through form, meter, symbolism, and rhythm.
The duke's desire for control is made evident by the structure of the poem. The poem’s iambic pentameter places stressed syllables in more of a limelight and shows which words the reader should pay more attention to. For example, in line 1, the duke says, “That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,” and in this line the word “my” is stressed, introducing a possessive tone. Although the duke was unable to control the duchess when she was alive, after her death he is in complete control of her. The duke says “none puts by the curtain I have drawn for you, but I,” revealing that now he is able to control both the duchess's countenance and who views the portrait by using a curtain to cover the portrait (10).
In addition, the duke's loss of control is depicted through the rhythm of the poem. The run over lines in the poem, or enjambment, expose the duke's nervous uneasiness over his wife's murder. For example, near the end of the poem, the duke loses control. The reader can only imagine the horrified servant rising to go down the staircase, the duke's uneasiness as he loses control, and his desire to regain control of the situation as he says, “Nay we'll go down together, sir” (53). The frequent use of caesura...

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...e painter, he praises his hands, reducing his person effectively to a mere tool that is used for painting. Then as he continues on, one can’t help but sense the intense jealousy which resides in the duke’s heart, as he scorns on how easily pleased his lady was of anything beautiful and pleasant. He cannot stand her blushing for, and smiling at everything and everybody who pleases her. He is full of self-importance, a trait that is tarnished and brought into question when his wife does not share his arrogance and haughty attitude. Such is his arrogance that having a normal conversation with his wife or telling her what he expects from her is considered by him to be below his standards. He chooses not to talk to her about her faults, which are naught but a liveliness of nature, a happy disposition, and a yearning for life, but rather ends that which he cannot control.

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