Starting from the title, the reader’s first impression is that the speaker voice will talk about a duchess, the last one. Reading the first line, the listener understands the speaking voice is her widowed husband from the use of the possessive adjective “my”. Indeed, the first-person speaker doesn’t correspond with the poet. It is one of the many features of a dramatic monologue. Moreover, spatial and temporal setting is clear in the reader’s mind. The poem is set in a private art gallery in the Palace of the Duke of Ferrara in the mid-sixteenth century. It is a particular significant moment in the Duke’s life: he remembers his dead wife as if he misses her. The reader understands the love and nostalgia he feels towards her by the way the Duke describes her looking at her portrait: “Looking as if she were alive”. By sharing these feelings, the speaker arouses some sympathy – another typical feature of the dramatic monologue.

Reading the fifth line, the reader understands the Duke is speaking to a silent listener who cannot help but hear. The Duke starts to tell him/her about his wife. Here the Duke’s possessiveness towards his wife comes to surface. The Duchess must have been a really passionate woman, who demanded her freedom. Now that she is dead, the Duke can control this aspect of her by capturing her passion and make sure her glances were only towards him: “for never read strangers like you that pictured countenance”.

Her husband wasn’t her only source of joy, she liked other things and, more important, other men. At this point the Duke talks about the way she died, as if he knows. If he knows, it means he was there when is happened, indeed he could have killed her. He did it, maybe because she didn’t love him the way he loved her or maybe because she was disrespectful of him (at the time the respect of wives was extremely important in the social context) for the way she looked at other men or the way she considered his husband equal to them.