The Duke's Wife: Understanding a 16th Century Poem

The Poem's Background

• The poem is based on historical events involving Alfonso, the Duke of Ferrara, who lived in the 16th century.

The Poem's Speaker and Setting

• The Duke is the speaker of the poem.
• The poem takes place in the Duke's palace, where he is entertaining an emissary.

The Purpose of the Emissary's Visit

• The emissary has come to negotiate the Duke's marriage to the daughter of another powerful family.
• The Duke has recently been widowed.

The Portrait of the Late Duchess

• The Duke shows the emissary a portrait of his late wife.
• The Duchess was a young and lovely girl.
• The portrait sessions triggered the Duke's reminiscing about his wife.

The Duke's Reminiscence and Criticism

• The Duke recalls the Duchess's behavior, claiming she flirted with everyone.
• He feels she did not appreciate the "gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name" (her marriage to him).
• The Duke's monologue reveals his growing anger and resentment towards the Duchess.

The Duchess's Demise

• The Duke implies that he caused the Duchess's early demise.
• When her behavior escalated, he "gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together."

The Duke's New Marriage Plans

• After revealing the Duchess's fate, the Duke returns to discussing his new marriage plans with the emissary.
• He wants to marry another young girl.

The Duke's Palace and Art Collection

• As the Duke and the emissary leave the portrait behind, the Duke points out other notable artworks in his collection.

Poem Structure and Style

• The poem "My Last Duchess" consists of rhyming pentameter lines with no end-stops, using enjambment to create a subtle driving force behind the Duke's revelations.
• The rhymes do not create a sense of closure, but rather remain a driving force behind the Duke's speech.

The Duke's Character

• The Duke is a performer, mimicking others' voices, creating hypothetical situations, and using his personality to make horrifying information seem merely colorful.
• The Duke's ravings suggest that most of the supposed transgressions took place only in his mind.

Historical Setting

• The poem is set in the Italian Renaissance, which fascinates Browning and his contemporaries for its flowering of aesthetics and humanism alongside religion and morality.
• The Renaissance setting allows Browning to explore sex, violence, and aesthetics as entangled and complicating each other.

Themes and Motifs

• The poem explores the themes of sex, violence, and aesthetics, as well as the male desire to inscribe and fix female sexuality.
• The Duke's need to control the Duchess's sexuality mirrors the efforts of Victorian society to control individual behavior.
• The poem raises questions about the moral component of art, asking whether it is merely an aesthetic exercise or has a moral responsibility.

Reader Engagement

• The poem engages the reader on a psychological level, forcing them to piece the story together and consider their own response to the subject and its portrayal.
• The poem tests the reader's response to the modern world, asking whether everyday life has made them numb to horror and beauty.
• Browning's work prefigures writers like Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde in its exploration of art's moral component.

Dramatic Monologue Verse Form

• Allows exploration of characters' minds in specific circumstances
• Enables readers to enter characters' minds and see events from their perspective
• Presents multiple perspectives and versions of the same story
• Highlights the multiplicity of perspectives that make up the truth
• Shows how the nature of truth or reality fluctuates depending on one's perspective

Multiple Perspectives and Companion Pieces

• Browning wrote poems that work together as companion pieces (e.g., "Fra Lippo Lippi" and "Andrea del Sarto")
• These poems illustrate how people with different characters respond differently to similar situations
• Show how a time, place, and scenario can cause people with similar personalities to develop or change dramatically

The Purposes of Art

• Browning wrote poems about artists and poets (e.g., "Pictor Ignotus" and "Fra Lippo Lippi")
• These poems attempt to capture the philosophical views of artists and their purposes
• Art can:
  • Heighten our powers of observation and help us notice things about our own lives
  • Idealize the beauty found in the real world
  • Memorialize famous or important people
  • Help its creators make a living, having a pecuniary purpose as well as a creative one

This quiz is about a poem that explores the thoughts and feelings of Alfonso, the Duke of Ferrara, as he reminisces about his late wife and entertains a proposal for his next marriage. The poem is set in the 16th century and offers a glimpse into the life of the aristocracy during that time. Test your understanding of the poem and its historical context.