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Robert Browning life and work
Robert Browning life and work
Robert Browning life and work
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When talking about personal relationships, one may not realize how bias he or she is to his or her own side of the story. This seems to be the case in the two poems “My Last Duchess” written by Robert Browning and its parody “My Ex-Husband” written by Gabriel Spera. Both poems have speakers that are describing people who were close to them at one time.While these speakers are different in the reasons on why they are upset with their exes, both speakers end up showing their own flaws while trying to point out their last partner's shortcomings. The speakers in these two poems both have issues with the people they have been with. In the poem “My Last Duchess,” the speaker, the Duke of Ferrara, is complaining about his last wife and how he
Marriage can be defined as an everlasting bond between two people. Two souls joining to form one. However, sometimes this bond can fade and the love that each person felt for one-another can dissipate and manifest into something uglier and darker than the warmth of love. In Elizabeth Stoddard’s poem The Wife Speaks, the speaker ponders her relationship and wonders what could be done to mend the void in her marriage to make it as it once was. Although the speaker’s current relationship is posing it be a challenge, though the use of a non-traditional structure, vivid imagery, and the emotional tone in this poem, the speaker coveys to the reader that though the sacrifices for marriage, the strive for perfection and the hope that things can get better, love will overcome and the unity with her husband will return.
In the novel, Beauty by Robin Mc Kinley, the family of a wealthy merchant looses their wealth when the shipment boats get lost at sea. There are three daughters named Hope, Grace, and Honour, whom is nicknamed Beauty, and a father. The family is forced to move to the country and start a life more modest than accustomed. After the family adapts to country life, one of the older sisters gets married to an iron worker who used to work at the shipyard owned by the father. They have babies. Life goes on in the country.
Through diction, the tone of the poem is developed as one that is downtrodden and regretful, while at the same time informative for those who hear her story. Phrases such as, “you are going to do bad things to children…,” “you are going to suffer… ,” and “her pitiful beautiful untouched body…” depict the tone of the speaker as desperate for wanting to stop her parents. Olds wrote many poems that contained a speaker who is contemplating the past of both her life and her parent’s life. In the poem “The Victims,” the speaker is again trying to find acceptance in the divorce and avoidance of her father, “When Mother divorced you, we were glad/ … She kicked you out, suddenly, and her/ kids loved it… ” (Olds 990). Through the remorseful and gloomy tone, we see that the speaker in both poems struggles with a relationship between her parents, and is also struggling to understand the pain of her
Love and Hate are powerful emotions that influence and control how we interact with people. To express this influence and control and the emotions associated with love and hate, for instance, joy, admiration, anger, despair, jealousy, and disgust, author's craft their writing with literary elements such as as structure, figurative language, imagery, diction, symbolism, and tone. Poems in which these can be seen present are “My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke, “My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning, and “Sonnet 130” by William Shakespeare. Within “My Papa’s Waltz” a mighty love is seen between the father and son. To express this Roethke uses figurative language, symbolism and diction. Within “My Last Duchess” there is little love, but an ample hate towards the duchess from the Duch. To express this the
Initially, both speakers in the literary texts are similar because they killed their lovers. In Duchess, the duke that is the speaker says blatantly that he killed his last wife. As the speaker says in lines 45-46, “I gave commands; then the smiling stopped all together.” These lines mean that he told her to stop smiling, but she didn’t listen to him, so therefore he killed her, thus the smiles stopped all together. He explained that he did this such action because she smiled too much. In the same way, the speaker of Lover explained that he killed his lover too. The speaker grabbed his woman’s hair, and wrapped it around her neck three times, and strangled her to death! “I found a thing to do, and all her hair in one long yellow string I wound three times her little throat around, and strangled her” (Lines 37-41).
The themes within the poems are very parallel. You see the theme of Self-importance or pride and Jealousy contained in both poems. “The Last Duchess” the pride and jealousy stems from the Duke himself due to the Duchesses supposed lack of attention to him. “E’en
Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” is a haunting poem that tells the story of a seemingly perfect wife who dies, and then is immortalized in a picture by her kind and loving husband. This seems to be the perfect family that a tragic accident has destroyed. Upon further investigation and dissection of the poem, we discover the imperfections and this perfect “dream family” is shown for what it really was, a relationship without trust.
Beauty is written by Robin McKinley in 1993 which is a retelling of the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast.
In contrast to Macbeth’s love for his wife, in Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’ there is an absence of the romanticised emotion of love. The Duke refers to his wife as ‘My Last Duchess. Here the use of the possessive pronoun ‘my’ gives us the idea from the outset that the Duke saw his wife as merely a possession. The iambic pentameter of ten syllables per line used in the poem also emphasises possession by stressing ‘my’ further in the pattern. Browning’s portrayal of love is one that is absent of emotional attachment, but instead something by which he could possess and have power over her. It could be argued that there are similarities in the way that Lady Macbeth also uses the emotion of love. Being in the form of a dramatic monologue, use
The poem “The Old Maid”, by Sara Teasdale, takes place on a sidewalk on Broadway. The speaker in the poem is a woman walking with who you can infer to be her fiancée and she is describing a brief encounter she had with another woman in the car driving by her. The speaker describes the woman as “The woman I might grow to be,” She then notices how her hair color “…was as mine” and how “Her eyes were strangely like my eyes”. However, despite all these similarities the woman’s hair compared to the speaker’s was “…dull and drew no light”. Her eyes also did not shine like the speaker’s. The speaker assumed that the reason for the woman’s frail appearance was because she had never had the opportunity to know what it was like to be in love. In the last stanza, the speaker no longer looks upon the old maid but to her lover and knows that even though they may look similar she will never be like her.
snap shot of Bull's views on his life. It is written as a stream of
It goes on to speak about sympathy in general and how Browning “delighted in making a case for the apparently immoral position”, how he found dramatic monologues the best form to do so, and how he went about it. It keeps going for a couple more pages on things which I will not go into because they have little relevance to any interpretation of “My Last Duchess”.
Robert A. Heinlein said, “A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.” Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” told from the perspective of the Duke in the form of a dramatic monolog. It showcases the Duke conversing with the Count’s representative about a hopeful marriage to the Count’s daughter as well as recalling his late wife. The Duke uses the opportunity to express his jealousy towards the Duchess. In “My Last Duchess,” a poem by Robert Browning, the Duke expresses the theme of jealousy to hide his inner struggle of insecurity.
The Duke of Ferrara was made jealous by everything the duchess did, no matter how unimportant it was. He was especially jealous of Fra Pandolf, the man who painted the duchess in the poem. A woman should be pleased only by her husband, as was not the case with the duchess and Fra Pandolf. She was “too easily impressed'; by the painter (line 23). Fra Pandolf was not the only man that made the duke jealous. Everyone who passed the duchess received “much the same smile'; as the duke (line 44). The duke expected to be the only man to receive a smile from his wife.
Both of these poems can be used read from different points of view and they could also be used to show how society treated women in the Nineteenth Century: as assets, possessions. Both of these poems are what are known as a dramatic monologue as well as being written in the first person. The whole poem is only one stanza long, and each line in the stanza comprises of eight syllables. ‘My Last Duchess’ is about a member of the nobility talking to an ambassador concerning his last wife, who later on in the poem is revealed to have been murdered by the person speaking, who is about to marry his second wife. ‘Porphyria's Lover’ gives an insight into the mind of an exceptionally possessive lover, who kills his lover in order to capture that perfect moment of compassion. ‘Porphyria's Lover’ uses an alternating rhyme scheme during most of the poem except at the end. The whole poem is only one stanza long, and each line in the stanza comprises of eight syllables.