My Last Duchess

My Last Duchess by Robert Browning is spoken by a duke showing a visitor a portrait of his dead wife. As he talks, he reveals that he was jealous of how freely she smiled at others, and that he had her killed. The visitor has come to arrange the duke's next marriage.

Browning published it in 1842. The duke is based on a real 16th-century Duke of Ferrara, in Renaissance Italy, when powerful men treated wives almost as possessions.

The poem is a dramatic monologue: one character speaks to a silent listener, revealing more about himself than he means to.

That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,

Looking as if she were alive; I call

That piece a wonder, now: Frà Pandolf's hands

Worked busily a day, and there she stands.

It is written in rhyming couplets, but the enjambment runs the lines on, so the rhymes are hidden. This suggests the duke's controlled surface, with his anger spilling over beneath.

Your anthology uses a later edition, so its punctuation may differ slightly from the 1842 text above.

The duke controls who sees the portrait: nobody draws ‘The curtain I have drawn for you, but I’. Now that she is dead, he can control her completely.

He complains that she was too easily pleased: ‘she liked whate'er / She looked on, and her looks went everywhere’. He couldn't bear her treating his gifts the same as anyone else's.

Then comes the chilling admission: ‘I gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together.’ The caesura and the short sentences suggest he had her killed, said as calmly as if he were talking about the weather.

Themes: the power of humans; pride and arrogance; jealousy; control over women.

Compares well with:

• Ozymandias: an arrogant ruler whose pride is exposed.
• London: power and the suffering it causes.
• Checking Out Me History: one voice speaking about power and control.