¶ … Last Duchess
An Analysis of Browning's "My Last Duchess"
Browning's "My Last Duchess" begins with an informal construction ("That's my last duchess") establishing the wistful, conversational tone with which Browning's Alfonso speaks of his late wife in the dramatic monologue style so frequently employed by the poet. This paper will analyze the poem from the standpoint of a formalist literary critic, evaluating Browning's "Duchess" according to language, structure, tone, imagery, plot, and other devices.
The plot of Browning's dramatic monologue is simple: Alfonso is strolling both literally and figuratively down memory lane -- a hall which houses a painting (by Fra Pandolf, we are told) of his late wife. The recollections stirred by the painting's viewing reveal the characters of both Alfonso and his "last duchess," and end suddenly, as though the narrator were content to muse only a moment. Ironically, the poem ends as it begins -- seemingly spontaneously (and yet not so -- for there is, in the Duke's sudden shift of focus to a bronze statue of Neptune taming a sea-horse, a kind of elegant...
Last Duchess';'Punishment'; 'Capital Punishment' Three Poems of Decentralization and Marginalization: Browning's "My Last Duchess; Heaney's "Punishment"; and Alexie's "Capital Punishment" Within the poems "My Last Duchess" by Robert Browning; Punishment by Seamus Heaney; and "Capital Punishment" by Sherman Alexie, all three authors deal, although in much different ways, with shifting, and often surprising, relationships between centrality and marginality: of speaker, subject, or both. In Browning's "My Last Duchess, for example the
Her blooming full-pulsed youth stood there in a moral imprisonment which made itself one with the chill, colorless, narrowed landscape, with the shrunken furniture, the never-read books, and the ghostly stag in a pale fantastic world that seemed to be vanishing from the daylight. (Eliot, XXVIII) However it is worth noting the implicit paradox expressed here in the notion of a married woman's "oppressive liberty." Dorothea Brooke marries sufficiently well
"The Sleeping Beauty" by Lord Alfred Tennyson uses several narrative techniques. The first of which can be seen in the second line of the first stanza. "She lying on her couch alone" (). The phrase uses incorrect English to change the tone of the poem. Although the poem does not try to establish a rhyming pattern in the BC in the first stanza with "grown" and "form," the two words
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