Zusammenfassung der Ressource
My last
duchess
- Language devices and notes
- Command words/ imperative
phrases
- 'Will't please you sit and look at her?'
- Anaphora
- 'Will't please you rise?'
- ^
- He wants to
assert his
power
- 'My gift of a
nine-hundred-years-old
name
- Pride
- Indignant that
the duchess
wouldn't put his
'gift' above all
others
- Power
- Lasted 900
years, and he is
a duke
- Rhetorical questions
- 'Who'd stop to blame this sort of trifling?'
- Jealousy
- 'Sir, ’twas not Her husband’s presence only, called
that spot of joy into the Duchess’ cheek;'
- Lack of sadness
- 'I gave commands; Then all
smiles stopped together. There
she stands As if alive. Will’t
please you rise?'
- Reminiscing
- 'the faint
Half-flush'
- 'the white mule She rode with
round the terrace'
- Lack of guilt
- Idea that his love for her grew cold
- 'This grew;'
- bitter tone
- need to control
emotions/ lack
of sexual
emotion
between the
partners
- Structure devices
- Iambic pentameter
- Rhyming
couplets/ regular
rhyme scheme
(AABB)
- Dramatic monologue
- Caesura and
enjambment
- Gives the effect of a flowing
- yet decidedly one sided -
conversation
- Context
- Robert Browning
- Elizabeth Barett Browning
- Extremely possessive and seemingly cold
hearted father
- Father/ parental link
- Browning drew ideas of possession and
cruelty from Elizabeth's father and his
actions
- Secretly met with and married Robert
knowing it was against what her father
wanted
- Disinherited by her
father for the
relationship
- Duke Alfonso II
- Married a young girl who died under
suspicious cicumstances
- Some claimed she had
been poisoned
- Many believed the Duke had gotten bored or
annoyed with her and ordered her murder
- Remarried twice after this
- 1842
- Browning was a
Romantic poet
- One Flesh
- Structural devices
- mostly regular
rhyme scheme
- Stanza focuses:1)Physical separation
2)Emotional separation
3)contrast over time
- Rhyming couplets (at the end of
each stanza)
- Iambic pentameter
- Language devices
- Similies
- 'like a girl dreaming of childhood'
- 'Tossed up like flotsam from a former passion'
- 'Silence between them like a thread to hold'
- Juxtaposition
- 'Strangely apart, yet strangely close together'
- 'Whose fire from which I came,
has now grown cold'
- 'Of having little
feeling - or too much'
- Rhetorical question
- 'Do they know they're old, These two who are my
father and my mother Whose fire from which I
came, has now grown cold?'
- Love grown cold
- 'now grown cold'
- bitter tone
- A loveless relationship
- Emotional confinement/
lack of emotional/sexual contact
between the partners
- Reminiscent tone at times
- Parents
- Context
- Jennings was a devout Catholic
- Poet: Elizabeth Jennings
- 1996
- Similarities are in purple
- Poet: Robert Browning