My Last Duchess is a dramatic monologue written by Robert Browning in 1842. The dramatis personae of this poem is the Duke, who shows a fresco representing his last wife to an envoy of the Count of Tyrol.

Starting from the title, the intelligent reader can understand that the most important word is "last": because of its ambiguity, the reader wants to discover who the duchess is and why the writer uses this word, which usually hints to the end of a series. Moreover the adjective "my" suggests the possessive and selfish character of the Duke.

As the subtitle points out, the setting of the poem is the city of Ferrara, which was an important centre when the family of Este reigned.

The poem is built using direct and indirect speech, although we don't know who the listener is. Nevertheless, the Duke employs an arrogant and authoritarian tone when he talks to his interlocutor ("Will't please you sit and look at her?", l. 5), calling him "stranger". Besides, he adopts an informal use of language, underlining his high position in respect to the
listener.

Reading the title we may expect the Duchess to be the main character; on the contrary, the focus is on the Duke's figure as the obsessive use of the adjective "My" and the pronoun "I" shows.

Because of his possessiveness and his jealousy he didn't tolerate the attention of her wife to the other people or things, he wanted his wife to care about him and no one else. He couldn't accept, then, her extroverted and easygoing personality and her cheerful attitude to life. This is the reason why he killed her ("Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands as if alive", l. 46-47). He is so proud of himself and of his regal family name ("as if she ranked my gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name with anybody's gift", l. 32-34) that he doesn't even regret what he did ("E'en then would be some stooping, and I choose never to stoop" l. 42-43).

        In the last lines, which are a sort of moral of the whole poem, the Duke explains what is his attitude to women and to his wives. He considers them as one of his properties, as objects (as the reader understands from line 53: "Though his fair daughter's self, as I avowed at starting, is my object", where the word "object" has the double meaning of "aim" and "thing").

The poem ends with the image of a statue of Neptune taming a sea-horse, which is an analogy to the attitude of the Duke towards women: he subjugates them and they must be subdued to him. The last word is "me", which indicates again the ego-pathology of the Duke that dominates not only women but also the whole poem.