English Lit - My Last Duchess

• My Last Duchess

  A dramatic monologue in which the Duke of Ferrara shows a painting of his former wife to a guest
• Duke of Ferrara

  • Points out the look on his wife's face - a kind of blush or a look of happiness
  • Explains how his wife disappointed him by looking not only at him, her husband, in this way but looking at everyone else in the same way
  • Everything impressed her and made her happy - the sunset, some cherries given to her by an admirer, or riding a horse
  • The duke was disappointed by this and gave commands, perhaps to have her killed
• The duke is telling this to the servant of a count

  The duke now wants to marry the count's daughter
• Dramatic monologue

  The poem focuses on a single person giving a speech to a silent listener, but the speaker is not the poet
• Form

  • Written in iambic pentameter with a tight rhyme scheme of rhyming couplets
  • Reflects the tight control of the duke and his belief in his own power and superiority
• Language

  • Use of personal pronoun 'my' suggests the duke's self-obsession and belief that his wife belongs to him
  • Formal terms of address like 'sir' and 'you' present the duke as powerful and socially superior
  • Questions like 'will it please you sit' and 'will it please you rise' are not really questions but demands
• The poem contains little figurative language, but the reference to the statue of Neptune taming a seahorse can be read as a metaphor for the duke's desire to dominate and control women
• Context

  • Set in the Italian Renaissance but written and published during the Victorian era, when a woman's role was seen as the 'angel of the house' who existed to serve and entertain her husband
  • The poem can be read as a criticism of Victorian attitudes towards women
• Despite the tight structural control, there are also features that suggest a lack of power and control, such as the sentences that run over multiple lines and the poem's structure as one long stanza
• Poems that compare well with My Last Duchess

  Ozymandias, extract from The Prelude, Kamikaze, Tissue - all deal with misguided notions of power