My Last Duchess — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
My Last Duchess
The poems
What you need to know
The Duke of Ferrara shows a visitor the portrait of his late wife, revealing his jealousy of her easy smiles and hinting that he had her killed, while he arranges his next marriage.
How Browning's language reveals the Duke: polite, controlled speech that slips into jealousy, his pride in his family name, and the chilling understatement of the commands that stopped her smiles.
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', 'Looking as if she were alive', 'none puts by / The curtain I have drawn for you, but I', 'A heart–how shall I say?–too soon made glad', 'her looks went everywhere', 'My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name', 'I choose / Never to stoop', 'I gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together', 'his fair daughter's self', 'Notice Neptune, though, / Taming a sea-horse'.
Form: a dramatic monologue of 28 rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter, with enjambment that hides the rhymes, a listener who never speaks, and an ending that turns from the portrait to the dowry and the bronze Neptune.
Context: Alfonso II d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, who married 13-year-old Lucrezia de' Medici in 1558, left her, and lost her in 1561 amid rumours of poisoning; Browning's Dramatic Lyrics (1842), where the poem was first titled Italy; and Browning's own comment that the commands were for her death, or for her to be shut up in a convent.
Compares well with: La Belle Dame Sans Merci (power and control), Valentine (possessive love), She Walks in Beauty (a woman looked at by a man) and The Manhunt (control against patient tenderness).
