“My last duchess” is a dramatic monologue written by Robert Browning, one of the famous poets of the 19th century, published in 1842 in Dramatic Lyrics. The poem is written in 28 rhymed couplets of iambic pentameter.

The title of "My Last Duchess," like the first few lines of the poem, gives us some information about the text. The adjective "My” makes the reader understand that the poem is going to be in the first-person. This word also suggest the idea of a man who his possessive with his woman. The title "Duchess" makes it clear that the monologue deal with European nobility. Moreover, the adjective "last" makes the reader understand that there will not be other Duchesses after.The title makes that in the readers’ mind arise different questions (like: why is she the Duke’s last Duchess? Why does the writer use the possessive adjective “my?), which will be solved in the monologue. According to these questions Browning forces his reader to become involved in the poem to understand it and its message.The subtitle “Ferrara” may be the setting of the monologue. Ferrara, during the 16th century was a city-state. For the nineteenth-century British readers, saying the Italian Renaissance held a particular fascination, for them it represented the flowering of the aesthetic, the extravagant living, sumptuous palaces, and also the moral.

"My Last Duchess" it's not organized in stanzas and the there is also an unusual use of informal language suggests by the presence of markers of direct speech (exclamation marks, inverted commas).The poem has the rhythm scheme called "iambic pentameter." Iamb is. a foot of two syllables, a short followed by a long in quantitative meter, or an unstressed followed by a stressed in accentual meter. Pentameter means that there are five ("penta") of those in a line.There is the use of enjambment, in which sentences don’t necessarily conclude at the end of lines, the rhymes don’t create a sense of closure, it sounds like a normal speech.The syntax, or sentence structure, of the poem pulls against its rhyme scheme. The lines are paired in rhymed couplets, but these couplets are "open" – that is, the sentences don’t finish at the same time the lines do. There’s a sense of struggle in his lines. The Duke mimics other voices, creates hypothetical situations. In all the text there is the presence of the assonance of the sound "i" which may reveals the Duke's individualism and his possessive attitude. The poem provides an example of a dramatic monologue, in which the speaker is clearly distinct from the poet; an audience is suggested but never appears; and the revelation of the Duke’s character is the poem’s primary aim.

This poem is based on historical events about Alfonso, the Duke of Ferrara, who lived in the 16th century.

The Duke is the speaker of the poem, and he is speaking with a silent interlocutor, that is a messenger who wants to discuss about a marriage between his leader's daughter and the Duke himself. In the very first lines it seems to the reader as if he could hear the words of the Duke. During the negotiations, the Duke shows to the visitor his private art gallery and several objects of his collection. He stops before a portrait of the late Duchess, apparently a young and lovely girl. The speaker seems to be really proud of the representation (he calls it "that piece a wonder"). The messenger is the first person who is allowed to admire it, maybe because he is a "stranger" and he did never happen to meet the Duchess. The reader has different information about the Duchess, through the Duke's words: she often blushes, her face suggests passion and depth and her eyes unveil devotion to the Duke. He seems to be an authoritative person and as if the duchess were scared of him: he wants to show his power in front of the “stranger” As his monologue continues, the reader realizes with ever-more chilling certainty that the Duke in fact caused the Duchess’s early demise: he becomes jealous of his woman. At line 19 there is an allusion to the Duchess murder figures. The Duchess’ "faults" were her courtesy to others people, which the Duke could not understand ("I know not how") because he thought that she did not reserve her attention only for him.

The Duke is a weak man, who as the only means to prove his worth and his power uses violence. The Renaissance was a time when morally dissolute men like the Duke exercised absolute power,

The monologue closes with an invitation to reach the other guests downstairs and the duke cannot get along without showing the messenger his exclusive sculpture in bronze.The last word is "me", which indicates again the ego-pathology of the Duke that dominates not only women but also the whole poem.

Finally, the reader can understand that the text from the Duke comes broader issues, like the problem of the lack of values in the human nature of the time.