Learning Paths » 5A Interacting
MY LAST DUCHESS
Es. pag. 218
1) My Last Duchess the setting is the city of Ferrara during the renaissance. The imaginary speaker is the Duke of Ferrara who is addressing a messenger of the Count whose daughter he intends to marry. While negotiating the marriage, he shows him a portrait of his dead wife and talks about her. Two very different personalities emerge in the poem. The young wife flushes with joy at very simple things - the sunset, the cherries and the white mule; she is courteous to everybody including people of lower ranks. The Duke finds it unbearable that she puts the same value on, for example, a "bough of cherries" as on the gift of his nine-hundred-year-old name. He is proud, class-conscious and possessive. He reveals himself as a tyrant who wants to have absolute control over his wife. As he was unable to, he "gave commands; than all smiles stopped together". As the men are going below the Duke expresses his confidence that the Count will grant his reasonable request for an ample "dowry", quickly adding "though his fair daughter's self is my object". His last remark is about a sculpture of Neptune "taming a sea horse" which is a visual metaphor for the Duke's wish to tame those under his control.
2) It has been argued that the attention given to the dramatic monologue in the Victorian Age represents a reaction against the inward looking tendency of romantic poetry, a wish to move away from the poet's own insights and reflections into a more objective/historical poetry. In other words, the use of dramatic monologue undermined the Romantic difference between the speaker and the poet and allowed the Victorian poet to widen his inconveniences of themes and tones, while achieving oblique self-expression.