My Last Duchess Poem Analysis

Love has the power to do many things; it can kill us and revive us. As humans, we have a certain need for love and affection and it can come in many forms; we can love a person, thing, place, or even a time in our lives. However, love comes to us tangled with many poisonous vines, such as jealousy, heartbreak, and lust.

Jealousy can be the root of all evil when it comes to loving somebody. We can have such strong and great emotion for a certain someone that whatever they do has the ability to drive us mad with jealousy. In Robert Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess,” the speaker is clearly jealous of his late wife. This poem is described by Browning himself as a “dramatic lyric,” however; the poem does not read like a lyric poem. This poem is a mix of a play and a poem, which is why he calls it a dramatic lyric. The meter used is an iambic pentameter. For example, “There’s MY last DUCHess HANGing ON the WALL,” is an example of the iambic pentameter. The poem is written in couplets and uses the rhyme scheme of AABBCC. Being that the speaker (the duke) is so filled with jealousy, we can see that there is a sense of struggle in the lines, like he is just barely managing to hold things in before he loses it at any minute. This gives the reader a sense of fright when thinking of what will happen when he finally loses control, given what happened to his “last duchess.” The title of this poem in itself tells us a lot about what we are getting ready to read. The fact that the title states it was the Duke’s “last” duchess makes us think about why she was his last duchess; did he have previous ones? Will there be more in the future, and does he get rid of them easily? Just by the title, we are intrigued to know more about the story. If you st...

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...all of these officious people did were just as important as what the Duke did for her. He states that he gave her his “nine-hundred-years-old name” meaning that she should value the social standing that he gave her when he married her. In my opinion, the most intriguing lines of the entire poem were:

This grew; I gave commands;

Then all smiles stopped together.

The Duke is saying that the Duchess’ kindness grew and became more extreme. He could no longer bear it and grew so full of jealousy that, and he states, “all smiles stopped together,” meaning that he either killed her or had her locked up somewhere. In turn, this makes her his “last duchess.” This poem is a great example of how love can come twisted with jealousy. We can have so much love and affection for someone that if we are not the only person they give their attention to, things can turn ugly.