My Last Duchess

271 Words2 Pages
Explore the ways in which the central character is presented in the poem My Last Duchess by Robert Browning - the poem is narrated in the first person, as if it was being spoken by a character on stage. We don't know who this character is, however. We have no name and no physical description - two things you would expect to have for any fictional character. All we have to go on is the words the Duke uses. The key to writing about characterisation here is to identify the use of certain techniques: * title - we know the Duchess is no longer around because of the title * possessives - we know the Duke is possessive because of his regular use of "my" * repetition - we know he is self-obsessed because of his repeated use of "I" * metaphor and form - we know he is hiding something because of his use of the curtain and the fact that the poem in written in rhyming couplets but the rhyme scheme is hidden * punctuation - we know he gets angry because the flow of his speech breaks down around line 22 * meaning - we suspect he may be guilty of something because the ambiguity of "I gave commands;/Then all smiles stopped together", which has two meanings * imagery - we might conclude that he had his wife (the last Duchess) killed because the final image of the expensive bronze statute also works as a metaphor: a lively-sea horse (the Duchess) is being tamed by someone powerful (the Duke) and that sense of life (the lively Duchess, the rolling sea) is now solid and heavy and dark (like
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