My Last Duchess Essay

Robert Browning’s speakers seem to love confessing, either through what the speaker suggests or how the speaker speaks. Death and Evil seem to be the draped in a mask of high social standing and beauty of his speakers. The themes of his poems usually portray multiple perspectives into the speaker’s dramatic monologues and the reader’s learn the many psychological levels the speaker exhibits. This is all prevalent in Robert Browning’s poem, “My Last Duchess.” The poem opens with the speaker presenting this lifelike portrait of his “last Duchess” emphasizing “That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall/ looking as if she were alive” (1-2). The speaker illustrates this full size portrait, to at first, an unknown listener in a dramatic fashion,

Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt, Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without Much the same smile? This grew. I gave commands; Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands As if alive. (36-47)

When confessing that he put his mesmerizing wife to death, for smiling, or so he declares, he asserts to his listener, a disclaimer. At the end of the story the speaker labels his listener as The Count, and whose daughter he is soon to marry. Robert Browning is not only using this dramatic monologue from the speaker as a confession, however, an underlying message to the Count of what is to come if his daughter is uncontrollable as well.

Once the speaker has completed his confession to his listener, he asks him to rise accordingly, walk down together, while pointing out his statue of Neptune taming a sea-horse. Not only is the Duke displaying his charm, once again, by walking along his guests, but also showing his underlying need for control: Nay, we’ll go Together down, sir. Notice Neptune,