My Lost Duchess

360 Words2 Pages
Discuss the characteristics of Dramatic Monologue with reference to Browning’s “My Last Duchess” Browning wrote poetry with a purpose – to explore the heart and mind of his characters, by making them talk in a particular situation about a certain incident, idea or experience. In his dramatic monologues, he looks at life from different perspectives. The dramatic monologist is aware of the relativity, the arbitrariness of a single way of life or way of looking at the world – so in his monologues Browning presents the “the inexhaustible multitudes of various lives which have been lived or can be lived.” In the following paragraphs, an analysis of the techniques applied by Browning in his dramatic monologues with special reference to “My Last Duchess” shall be dealt with. A dramatic monologue usually includes all or a few of the following elements: a fiction speaker and audience, a symbolic setting, Talismanic props, dramatic gestures, an emphasis on speaker’s subjectivity, a focus on dramatics, problematics of irony or non-irony and involved reader’s role playing. Browning presents all these ingredients in the most appealing and fascinating platter, “My Last Duchess” being his all time masterpiece when it came to dramatic monologues. A tension between sympathy and judgement, a power play between amazement and a sense of morality are among the striking features of dramatic monologue. M.W. MacCallum had observed in this regard, “But in every instance…the object (of the dramatic monologue) is to give facts from within. A certain dramatic understanding of the person speaking, which implies a certain dramatic sympathy with him, is not only essential, but the final cause of the whole species.” In ‘My Last Duchess’, the duke’s egregious villainy makes especially apparent the split between moral judgement and our actual feeling for him. The poem carries to the limit an
Open Document