Learning Paths » 5A Interacting
Answers to the questions about My Last Duchess by Browning:
- 1) The speaker is a character separate from the poet.
2) He has been drawn from history.
3) No, he isn’t. The setting in time and place is not precise.
b. 1) The presence of the listener can only be inferred from clues in the text, such as “Will't
please you sit and look at her?”, “not the first/Are you to turn and ask thus”, ”Will't please
you rise? We'll meet/The company below, then”.
2) There is a kind of interaction between speaker and listener, as a matter of fact the speaker
order to the listener to sit down or to stand up, but we can only see this part of their
relation.
- 1) Yes, the event the speakers hints at is of crucial importance for his life. As a matter of
fact, he tells the relationship between he and his wife. He killed her, because he was
jealous of her smiles to men.
- 1) The monologue refers to a past situation, which he tells in the present situation.
2) I think the Duke is not only jealous, but he is possessive in a brutal way. He killed his
wife just because he could not stand the smiles she gave to others.
3) I think, there’s a kind of discrepancy between how I see him and how he see himself. I
guess, he is proud of himself. As a matter of fact he hides intimately her as a prize, under
a curtain and no one opens the curtain except him.
e. 1) anaphoric features such as “that’s”, line1;
2) references to the situation in which the speaker and listener find themselves, such as “And
seemed as they would ask me”, line 11;
3) direct adress, such as “Will't please you rise?”, line 47;
4) contracted forms, such as “’twas”, line 25;
5) pauses, signalled by dashes, such as in line 32;
6) fillers when searching for the right expression, such as “I know not how”, line 32.
f. 1) I think the tone is one of reminiscence.