Themes: Marriage/Love, Men seeing women as possessions, Jealousy, Madness, Power Type: Dramatic Monologue/ Rhyming Couplets Background Written by Robert Browning Inspiration for the poem was Alfonso II whose wife died of suspicious circumstances Lucrezia was a Medici “Didn’t have a nine-hundred-year-old name” Power Fictional speech by a Renaissance Duke who is conducting a marriage negotiation…
“My Last Duchess” is a poem written by Robert Browning and originally published in 1842. It is a dramatic monologue in which the speaker is the Duke of Ferrara addressing a silent listener. The poem can be interpreted based on multiple approaches, the richest of which is the psychoanalytic approach. The Duke appears to be…
My Last Duchess is a mysterious dramatic monologue about a Duke of Ferrara who is showing off a portrait of his late wife to a visitor of his home. While showing this portrait of his last Duchess, the Duke begins to reminisce on their lives together, and, although he chooses his words carefully as he…