My last duchess

My last duchess

Language devices and notes
1. Command words/ imperative phrases
  1. 'Will't please you sit and look at her?'
    1. Anaphora
  2. 'Will't please you rise?'
    1. ^
  3. He wants to assert his power
2. 'My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
  1. Pride
    1. Indignant that the duchess wouldn't put his 'gift' above all others
  2. Power
    1. Lasted 900 years, and he is a duke
3. Rhetorical questions
  1. 'Who'd stop to blame this sort of trifling?'
4. Jealousy
  1. 'Sir, ’twas not Her husband’s presence only, called that spot of joy into the Duchess’ cheek;'
5. Lack of sadness
  1. 'I gave commands; Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands As if alive. Will’t please you rise?'
6. Reminiscing
  1. 'the faint Half-flush'
  2. 'the white mule She rode with round the terrace'
7. Lack of guilt
8. Idea that his love for her grew cold
  1. 'This grew;'
9. bitter tone
10. need to control emotions/ lack of sexual emotion between the partners
Structure devices
1. Iambic pentameter
2. Rhyming couplets/ regular rhyme scheme (AABB)
3. Dramatic monologue
4. Caesura and enjambment
  1. Gives the effect of a flowing - yet decidedly one sided - conversation
Context
1. Robert Browning
  1. Elizabeth Barett Browning
    1. Extremely possessive and seemingly cold hearted father
      1. Father/ parental link
        Browning drew ideas of possession and cruelty from Elizabeth's father and his actions
    2. Secretly met with and married Robert knowing it was against what her father wanted
    3. Disinherited by her father for the relationship
2. Duke Alfonso II
  1. Married a young girl who died under suspicious cicumstances
    1. Some claimed she had been poisoned
    2. Many believed the Duke had gotten bored or annoyed with her and ordered her murder
  2. Remarried twice after this
1842
1. Browning was a Romantic poet
One Flesh
1. Structural devices
  1. mostly regular rhyme scheme
  2. Stanza focuses:1)Physical separation 2)Emotional separation 3)contrast over time
  3. Rhyming couplets (at the end of each stanza)
  4. Iambic pentameter
2. Language devices
  1. Similies
    1. 'like a girl dreaming of childhood'
    2. 'Tossed up like flotsam from a former passion'
    3. 'Silence between them like a thread to hold'
  2. Juxtaposition
    1. 'Strangely apart, yet strangely close together'
    2. 'Whose fire from which I came, has now grown cold'
    3. 'Of having little feeling - or too much'
  3. Rhetorical question
    1. '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?'
  4. Love grown cold
    1. 'now grown cold'
  5. bitter tone
  6. A loveless relationship
  7. Emotional confinement/ lack of emotional/sexual contact between the partners
  8. Reminiscent tone at times
  9. Parents
3. Context
  1. Jennings was a devout Catholic
4. Poet: Elizabeth Jennings
5. 1996
6. Similarities are in purple
Poet: Robert Browning

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	Created by Alexandra Anderson about 6 years ago