A Comparison of Porphyria’s Lover and My Last Duchess by Robert Browning

A Comparison of Porphyria’s Lover and My Last Duchess by Robert Browning

The two poems ‘Porphyria’s lover’ and ‘my last duchess’ by Robert

Browning shows a dramatic monologue.

Dramatic monologue is a story that is told by one person; which means

you only get one point of view; in the two poems they are based on the

narrator’s crisis, his feelings and his way of thinking; and you have

to believe it because that is the only view your going to encounter.

In dramatic monologue because you only get one person telling the

story, you have to trust his judgements and criticisms and believe or

not believe what is being said. It is hard to trust what the narrator

says, because in ‘my last duchess’ his wife could of acted completely

different to how he was describing her, but you wouldn’t have known;

so we have to speculate about other issues we do not encounter and

also contemplate about controversies that can occur about only one

side being said.

Robert Browning makes the poems very similar in the way he uses poetic

devices like similes ‘As a shut bud that holds a bee’ which was used

in ‘Porphyria’s lover’ and in ‘my last duchess’ the use of simile is

used ‘Looking as if she was alive’; other poetic devices used are

rhetoric device which is used when in ‘my last duchess’ the duke is

trying to persuade the ambassador that he is a decent person and in

‘Porphyria’s lover’ he is persuading himself that he should kill her

so that he can be with her for ever because he loved her so much;

crime for passion, ‘A sudden thought of one so pale For love of her,

and all in vain’. Also in the poems the narrator likes to control

‘That moment she wa...

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...rol so he has taken the

ambassador to look at his possessions, which means the most to him,

and talk to him about his last wife and how he does not want to be

messed around. Whilst the ambassador was there his job is to talk to

the Count of Tyrol about everything so the duke is trying to be in his

good side and speak politely and also uses false modesty when he says

‘even had you skill in speech – (which I have not)’ when in fact he

has probably got a better speech than him. This is also a case in

Shakespeare – Julius Caesar when Brutus his best friends made a

powerful speech that drew the people to vote for him and used a

rhetorical device which is used to persuade people. This is irony and

it is used for effect.

I conclude by saying that the themes Browning used where success,

failure, power and disappointment.