"My Last Duchess": Romantic but Anti-Romance

Of all the Romantic poetry we've been reading, Robert Browning has definitely been one of my favorite writers, which was kind of a pleasant surprise, since I hadn't really heard of him before. I really like how his poems generally start out with a description of an object or a landscape and then personified it in a way so that it came to represent some aspect of the greater human experience. Maybe I'm like internally emo or something but for some reason his darker, cynical stances on human emotions and reality was very moving to me. The poem "My Last Duchess" that we read this week particularly stuck out to me, because the first time I read it through, I couldn't really tell what was going on, but it gave me kind of a sinister vibe. The title for one thing is a little ominous - my last duchess? Did you   go all Henry VIII and off her or something? Lines such as "Then all smiles stopped together" and  "There she stands/As if alive" only made it all the creepier, and I was wondering who this poem was based off of, it it was a real event, so I decided to do a little research and analysis of this poem for this week's (and my last!) post.

Lucrezia de'Medici, first wife of Alfonso d'Este,
suspected inspiration for My Last Duchess

Apparently the word "Ferrera" (in our book it says Ferrars, but everywhere online I saw the poem it says Ferrera so maybe that was a typo) refers to Alfonso II d'Este, the fifth Duke of Ferrera, which is a province in Italy. Browning I guess was doing some research about him for another poem called Sordello. I looked up this Duke Alfonso, and something I found intriguing was that his first wife (he was married three times) was 14 when they got married, then she died mysteriously three years later, and one of the suspected causes of death is poisoning. Just an interesting coincidence.

The poem is in the form of a dramatic monologue. Characteristics of a monologue is that the speaker is usually an outside character, not the author themselves, they are usually addressing someone but we can only tell who is being addressed from clues in the monologue,  and the purpose of the monologue is typically to reveal the inner character of the speaker. Apparently Robert Browning was most known for his dramatic monologues, and they were a popular form during the Romantic era because they allowed for a sort of exploration of one's inner emotional experience.

Once I knew this, the poem was a lot easier to understand. The speaker in this poem is presumably the Duke (of Ferrara perhaps), and from the line "The Count your master's known munificence" he is addressing a servant of sorts to a generous Count, and it seems there are some sort of marriage negotiations going on. The most important aspect of the poem, as of any dramatic monologue, however, is the character of the speaker that is revealed through their words. And it would appear that our speaker is one slimy guy. There is an overwhelming sense of egotism - the speaker describes how offended he was by how kind his wife was to all other men "...as if she ranked/My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name/With anybody's gift". When she smiled at him it was seen merely as an expected behavior: "Oh, Sir, she smiled, no doubt/Whenever I passed her; but who passed without/Much the same smile". It almost seems like the speaker had such an extremely large ego that it evolved into a strong paranoia, the Duchess was "too soon made glad,/Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er/She looked on, and her looks went everywhere" - it sounds like the Duchess is (was) one of those people who is generally optimistic, being nice to everyone, finding good in everything, but the Duke wants all of this attention turned toward himself.

And so, somehow, the Duchess is now smiling for only the Duke. In the lines, "The depth and passion of its earnest glance,/But to myself they turned (since none puts by/The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)" we see that the Duke has the Duchess' portrait behind a curtain, and so he now even has control over who gets to see the painting of his wife. I also think it's interesting how the speaker comments twice about how the Duchess looks alive - she has quite literally turned into another piece in his collection. The way the poem concludes only confirms this - the speaker never mentions what happened to the Duchess, only that he gave commands and she stopped smiling - and then he casually brushes it aside, saying "Nay, we'll go/together down, Sir!" He then comments on a bronze statue of Neptune taming a sea-horse, reinforcing his image as an all-controller looking to tame things and add them to his collection to show off and assert his power even further. This could be an overly-feminist interpretation of the poem, but still, if you were servant of the Count who may be marrying his daughter to this man, would you let this event take place?

Works Cited

Browning, Robert. "My Last Duchess". Six Centuries of Great Poetry. Ed. Erskine, Albert and Robert Penn Warren. New York: Dell Publishing, 1922.

"My Last Duchess". The Victorian Web. 27 Oct 2011. 5 Dec 2013. <http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/rb/duchess/duchess.html>.

"My Last Duchess". Wikipedia. 21 Nov 2013. 5 Dec 2013. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Last_Duchess>.

"Poetic Technique: Dramatic Monologue". Poets.org. The Academy of American Poets. 5 Dec 2013. <http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5776>.