MY LAST DUTCHESS.
" My Last Duchess is a poem more about the nature of personality and perception and less about pride, insecurity and aestheticism. Certainly MY LAST DUTCHESS is about those topics, but they are themes generated from the shaping of personality and determined by the limits of perception which are dramatized in the poem."-Slinn.
IN "my last duchess" The Duke is the speaker of the poem, and he is entertaining an emissary who has come to negotiate the Duke's marriage (he has recently been widowed). As he shows the visitor through his palace, he stops before a portrait of the late Duchess. The Duke begins reminiscing about the Duchess. His musings give way to a diatribe on her disgraceful behavior: he claims she flirted with everyone and did not appreciate his "gift of a nine-hundred-years- old name." As his monologue continues, the reader realizes with ever-more chilling certainty that the Duke in fact caused the Duchess's early demise: when her behavior escalated.
We realize through the Dukes ravings that most of the supposed transgressions took place only in the dukes mind. This is made evident when the duke describes how she had a heart "too soon made glad"; he claimed that "she liked whate"er /she looked on, and her looks went everywhere." All was alike to her, his favor at her breast , a ride on the mule. This makes us question the validity of Dukes allegations. There is an illusive suggestiveness of metaphoric and aesthetic language which coincides with the ambiguous reality of a subject determined view experience. Browning's use of satire and irony are evident in lines like these-"looking as if she were alive" or "This grew ;I gave commands ;/Then all smiles stopped together.". Irony functions in Brown poetry to undermine the authority of the speaker of the monologue. The Duke is revealed to be a prisoner of his own subjectivity.
