My Last Duchess

Summary

My Last Duchess is a dramatic monologue of 56 lines, first published in Robert Browning's Dramatic Lyrics in 1842 and headed Ferrara. The speaker is a Renaissance Duke of Ferrara, and his listener, who never speaks, is an envoy sent by a Count to arrange the Duke's marriage to the Count's daughter. As the two men pause in the Duke's gallery, he draws back a curtain that only he may open and shows a portrait of his former wife, painted by Frà Pandolf, that looks as if she were alive. He explains that visitors always want to ask what put such an earnest glance and spot of joy in her face, and he takes it on himself to answer. Her fault, as he describes it, was that she was too easily pleased: a compliment from the painter, the sunset, a bough of cherries brought by a servant, a ride on her white mule round the terrace, all drew the same thanks and blush from her as his own favors. She seemed to rank his gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name with anybody's gift. He would not lower himself to correct her, since even explaining his displeasure would be stooping, and he chooses never to stoop. Her smiles grew more general; he gave commands; then all smiles stopped together. With that, he invites the envoy to rise and go down to the company, mentions the dowry he expects from the Count while insisting that the daughter herself is his object, and on the stairs points out a bronze of Neptune taming a sea-horse, cast for him by Claus of Innsbruck. The poem's power lies in what the Duke reveals without meaning to: his pride, his jealousy of every pleasure not given by him, and very likely his responsibility for his wife's death, all while he negotiates his next marriage. Browning writes in rhymed couplets of iambic pentameter, but the sentences run so freely across line ends that the rhyme is barely heard, giving the effect of polished conversation.

Top Lessons

• Pride that cannot stoop

  The Duke's ruling principle is that he chooses never to stoop, and that refusal leaves him unable even to speak to his wife about what grieves him. Browning shows pride not as grandeur but as a cramped, possessive smallness.

• A person turned into a possession

  The Duchess is now a painting behind a curtain that only the Duke may draw, and the poem ends with another work of art he owns. The poem asks readers to notice how the Duke values his wife as he values his bronzes.

• Reading what a speaker does not say

  The Duke never states that he had his wife killed; the reader infers it from I gave commands and the silence that follows. Dramatic monologue trains careful readers to hear what a speaker reveals beyond his intention.

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