What happened to the duchess?

Robert Browning (1812-1889) married Elizabeth Barrett in 1846. She was by far the more popular poet in their time; Browning’s contemporaries felt that he was not a very skillful poet. His poems were grotesque, and they didn’t conform to ideals of beautiful poetry. Take the lines

That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now: Fra Pandolf’s hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands. (lines 1-4)

Notice how the poem fails to use closed heroic couplets. Instead of the sentence stopping at the end of the second line, it stops early, two words before the end of the line. And then a new sentence begins at the end of line two, spilling over into line three after just a couple of words. A more talented poet wouldn’t be that sloppy.

If Browning’s contemporaries didn’t consider him a talented poet, his later readers were much more appreciative. He’s known now as an innovator in poetry, a master of the “dramatic monologue,” a form of poetry that couldn’t be more different from the conception of poetry as the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions. In a dramatic monologue, the poet creates a character who speaks throughout the poem, often revealing more than the character really intends. In the typical Romantic or Victorian poem, one reads the words of the poem to discover how the poet really feels about an event or subject, but in a dramatic monologue, the words come from the character, and we often have to read the character’s words carefully to discover what the author is trying to communicate to us.

According to the Merriam Webster Encyclopedia of Literature, Browning is not the first poet to make use of the dramatic monologue, but he made significant contributions to the form, particularly “subtlety of characterization and complexity of the dramatic situation, which the reader gradually pieces together from the casual remarks or digressions of the speaker. The subject discussed is usually far less interesting than what is inadvertently revealed about the speaker himself.”

Again, it’s possible that one of the reasons Browning wasn’t appreciated during his own time is that he’s not writing lyric poetry—dramatic monologues are at the opposite extreme of spontaneous, emotional poetry.

Today, it’s not hard to recognize Browning’s skill. We start reading “My Last Duchess” wondering about the situation we find ourselves in. Who is the speaker? Why does he call the woman in the picture “my last Duchess?” In the second line we learn she’s no longer alive, but then we may start to wonder why he speaks about her in the way that he does. He doesn’t seem broken up with grief about her death—he’s more interested in showing the painting to whoever it is he’s talking to than in an emotional response to her death. What’s going on here?

As the poem continues, we start putting the pieces together: the speaker is the late Duchess’s husband, the Duke, and he keeps talking about the look of joy on her face, first in reference to the painting and then in reference to her person. We’d expect a husband to be happy that his wife has a joyful look on her face, but it seems to have bothered the Duke. He complains, “She had/A heart—how shall I say?—too soon made glad,/Too easily impressed” (lines 21-23), and soon he’s making a list of things that made her glad but apparently shouldn’t have, including sunsets and a white mule. Again, the revelation makes us wonder: what kind of husband feels upset that his wife is made happy by a sunset?

As the poem continues, the Duke’s objections to his wife’s actions seem more and more strange: he dislikes her thanking other men for things because he feels it seems “as if she ranked/My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name/With anybody’s gift” (32-34), and when he speaks hypothetically of talking with her about his feelings, he says, “Just this/Or that in you disgusts me” (37-38)—strong language for what seems to be such an inoffensive action.

Ultimately, he reveals what happened to her: “This grew; I gave commands;/Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands/As if alive” (45-47). What he’s communicating, in his off-hand way, is that he had her put to death, and what’s most appalling about the revelation is that he’s so off-hand about it. “I gave commands.” He had a woman killed because she wasn’t sufficiently happier to see him than anybody else.

The rest of the poem is just as appalling, in its own way. The person the Duke is speaking to turns out to be the representative of a Count who is offering the Duke his daughter’s hand in marriage. Learning this gives the poem new context and a different meaning. The Duke has been telling the story with a purpose in mind—he seems to be communicating that he wants the Count to know that if his daughter doesn’t behave as he wants her to, his next Duchess may soon be hanging on the wall as well, looking as if she were alive.

The content of the poem helps us understand why the poem takes the form it does as well. Browning is writing in heroic couplets—he’s not far off from Pope in that regard. But he starts and stops the lines at unexpected places, making the reader stop in the middle of the line and rush through the end of one line to get to the next, so we can often read an entire Browning poem without realizing that it was written in couplets. I’d argue that this is appropriate to his subject—he’s writing about characters who are anything but smooth and metrical and regular and beautiful. The way the poem is written reflects who they are.


For discussion:
- The Duke obviously has an agenda—his portrayal of the Duchess gives only his point of view. If we try to see past his point of view, what was the Duchess really like?

- The poem could have just involved the Duke telling the story of the Duchess—instead, we begin with a discussion of her portrait and end with a reference to a bronze statue by Clause of Innsbruck. We have to assume Browning put these elements in the poem for a reason—what do they contribute to the poem’s overall meaning?