‘My Last Duchess’ by Robert Browning!
One of my all-time favourite poems.
I love Browning’s poetry so much, I decided to put out a 38-minute video analysis.
‘My Last Duchess’ Analysis – How Robert Browning Writes A Poem
‘My Last Duchess’ At A Glance:
- Heroic Verse – iambic feet (five stress lines), couplets (aabbccdd), rhyming. Well suited to epic themes and dramatic monologues.
- Dramatic monologue spoken by the Duke of Ferrara, who is showing an ambassador around his palace in preparation for the Duke’s second marriage. We learn that the Duke had his first wife killed because of her over-friendliness.
- Ironic contrast – elegant, noble, poetic, heroic form contrasting with conversational tone and mad, psychotic content.
‘My Last Duchess’ Analysis:
Where is the stress in the first line?
last
She’s a commodity just like the painting itself – the fact that he’s talking about last suggests that he’s looking for a new one, perhaps one who will also be as easily replaceable.
Thrown into the middle of a scene and thrown into someone else’s skin (we’re in their skin by virtue of the second person address, you), we are the emissary the Duke is talking to, and we’re on a walking tour. Immediately right from the beginning, we imagine long lines and hallways filled with paintings.
Poets and wordsmiths always have a tension when it comes to the tools of their trade: words.
This reminds me of Joseph Conrad’s aim to make you, above all, see:
My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see.
And this causes a lot of distress for writers because they want you to SEE.
And they know, or are insecure about the fact that, pictures tell a greater story than words.
Like that saying a picture paints a thousand words. Or Da Vinci’s claim that:
Your tongue will be paralysed by thirst and your body by sleep and hunger before you can show with words what the painter shows us in an instant.
Visual language immediately:
painted on the wall.
But something the poet can achieve is the art of suggestion – double meanings in words.
Second line:
Looking as if she were alive
We’re drawn to how she looks, and the fact that she looks so lifelike that the painting is obviously masterfully done, but this gives us another clue immediately that the duchess is dead – how can she be alive if she’s looking as if she were alive?
Not only that, but the word looking makes us imagine how her gaze is in the painting.
Without Browning telling us what she looks like, we immediately imagine eyes, expression, face – how is she looking at us?
Is she looking to be liberated from the painting?
Is she looking out from beyond the grave?
The magic of art is its ability to capture the ephemeral, the short-lived, the quick to die, in permanent form.
Just like the duchess who is dead but captured in eternity in the painting, she is also captured in this poem (we don’t even see the painting and yet she is immortalised further), and the Duke and emissary too – long dead (if they ever existed of course) but immortalised forever in words as long as the words are read.
Lets go back to the second line – always look where there are pauses in a poem. There’s a full stop right before the line ends, we’re pausing right in the middle, and right after the word “alive”.
Browning does this deliberately because he wants that to really sink in.
This pause is pregnant with horrific meaning, ghastly possibility.
Is she alive? Is she dead? How did she die?
You don’t even notice that the poem uses rhyming couplets.
Just like the painting must be really realistic, making us almost forget it’s artifice and not real, the conversational tone of the poem, constructed with the pauses that mimic the rhythms of real speech, make us forget that this too is artifice – it’s not an actual spoken monologue, but a poem.
How else does Browning create a scene and put you in the shoes of another person, create a sense of reality, with rhetorical devices?
Look at that rhetorical question. Browning never fully tells you where you are or who you are or who the speaker is – but we the reader are able to piece all of this together unconsciously and create some vivid images in our mind just from questions like this.
Would you like to sit and look at her?
What’s not being said = take some rest, we’ve been walking for a while, and look up at this huge painting (at least this makes me assume it’s huge) and admire it.
We know that the one he is speaking to does take a seat because right at the end of the poem he asks him to rise again.
What’s he saying when talking about strangers picturing an earnest glance and countenance?
Basically, the dead duchess is pictured making eyes. It sounds like she’s looking a little flirtatious, or perhaps looking as though she’s with someone she is intimate with or fond of. It’s perhaps quite a sultry, coquettish, seductive look.
And how was such an intimate expression was captured? Surely the painter was not present in their private bedroom while the duchess looked at the duke admiringly?
Nope, the Duke explains, she looked that way at basically everyone. Doesn’t matter who it was. That look wasn’t reserved for her husband, unfortunately.
Repetition is important.
The Duke mentions Fra Pandolf, the artist, by name three times in a short space. Was the Duke jealous that the painter, by complimenting his lady, was able to bring up a spot of joy in her cheeks? Did he watch him paint her, watch her blush, and decide to have her killed shortly after?
Of course, he could be repeating the name because it has some acclaim and he’s boasting about the esteemed artist he was able to commission for a portrait. But every time he mentions his name, something deeper is revealed. At first, we’re focusing on his “hands” working “busily a day” – quite a sensuous image.
Were his hands just on this canvas?
What else might they have been working on? At least in the Duke’s mind, they might have been on his lady.
Let’s look at one of my favourite lines:
Paint must never hope to reproduce the faint Half-flush that dies along her throat
This returns to that same anxiety that I spoke of earlier.
The wordsmith is worried he cannot capture the reality of his subject. Well, looks as though painter’s experience this too. The painter’s basically saying the nuance and magic of this aspect of the subject, the duchess, will never be fully and faithfully rendered in paint – one must be in her presence to experience that.
But I also love how we’re immediately thinking of her death – the flush “dies along her throat”, so the redness is lessening along her throat, but we cannot help but think about how she died.
Was her neck cut? Was she hung?
Did that redness return to her throat in the form of pain and strangulation at her moment of death?
Another thing I love about the rhetorical devices Browning uses is when he breaks up the lines, fractures them, to show the mental distress and disintegration of the Duke.
He’s talking to this emissary, but he’ll ask himself a rhetorical question (“how shall I say”) with parenthesis in order to find the right word.
Not only does this increase the natural tone of the poem, and reinforce the conversational nature, but it makes the speaker seem crazy.
Stopping, starting, pausing, reflecting.
The Duke is in a state, consumed still by jealous thoughts even after he’s had his wife murdered (at least that’s what we’re assuming has happened).
He’s finding the right words here because he knows he can give his jealousy and craziness away if he doesn’t speak carefully, so he picks a euphemism – saying one thing as a substitute for another – a heart “too soon made glad” – what he really wants to say is she was a whore or overly eager people-pleaser, a flirt and coquette.
I love the fact that there is a pause right after the word “heart” too – some might say this is coincidental, but I believe Browning is being deliberate here – just like we paused at the word “throat”, we are pausing at the word “heart” and the meaning we are getting is not a love-filled image.
For me personally, I imagine a beating heart that has come to an abrupt stop, just like the pause after the word in the poem.
Structure reflects meaning.
There’s a lot of parallelism here, and that poetic technique is a form of repetition, and remember whenever you see repetition, either of word or structure, in a poem, you’re seeing something important.
“Too soon made glad”, “too easily impressed”. She liked whatever she looked at, and her looks went everywhere. Again, the Duke doesn’t have to say exactly what the problem was, we can infer it.
He did not feel special. He then compares his own favour, how he feels about her, how he treats her, with everything from a natural scene of a sunset, to a gift someone “a fool” brought her, to even the horse she rode on. The duke does not like her being pleased with anyone or anything but him.
Look at the rhythm of the line where she “thanked me” – it’s all broken up and fractured as he tries to find his words, he’s trying to be careful, but then he hits a stride and suddenly we have a long flow in which he lets it out – she thought his title was on par with anyone and anything else.
We can imagine him suddenly being overcome with anger here, a quick burst rant.
And here’s a lesson in human nature, especially the nature of man:
Always appeal to a man’s sense of pride.
To a man, being disrespected is one of the most hurtful things you can do. And the more petty the man, the greater the ego, the easier it is to disrespect him.
His wife smiling at a sunset is enough for him to perceive disrespect in the form of her not caring about him, his title, or rank.
And so she was killed.
How do we know he killed her?
Look at the rhythm and how it changes to short declarative sentences, a nice break from the fractured rhythm previous, when he says “I gave commands”, then “all smiles stopped” – we assume he gave orders to have her killed.
And then he repeats that ominous opening phrase, the one so pregnant with meaning at the beginning of the poem – there she stands, “as if alive”. The juxtaposition of him giving commands, her smile stopping, and then her looking as if alive make it all quite obvious – he had her killed.
Browning himself, when questioned about this line, said that, ‘yes, it means put to death…or she was shut up in a convent.’
Which is true is left up to the reader to decide.