My Last Duchess — AQA GCSE English Literature 8702
AQA GCSE English Literature · 8702
My Last Duchess
The poems
What you need to know
My Last Duchess by Robert Browning: what it is about, its context, and how Browning uses language, form and structure.
Key quotations and how to analyse them, and the poems in the cluster it compares well with, with similarities and differences.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'That's my last Duchess painted on the wall', 'none puts by / The curtain I have drawn for you, but I', 'too soon made glad', 'My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name', 'I gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together', 'Notice Neptune, though, / Taming a sea-horse'.
Form: a dramatic monologue in rhyming couplets, with enjambment hiding the rhyme.
Context: the Duke of Ferrara and the Italian Renaissance, and Browning's Victorian readers.
Comparisons with Ozymandias, Checking Out Me History and The Émigrée.
