Friday, August 30, 2019

Poetry Analysis Essay

Irony is a crucial literary device in the dramatic monologue My Last Duchess by Robert Browning. Actually, one of the most important things that can be said about Robert Browning is that he is a perfect ironist, and that irony is an important part of My Last Duchess. In, My Last Duchess, the Duke is projecting one image of himself, yet, through the ironic structure of the poem and the distance it imposes, his image is revealed to readers in a way that contradicts the Duke’s self-image. The Duke proposes an image of himself as gorgeous, wise, with nice attitudes and manners, an expert, a complete man. However, readers of the poem deduce a jealous or crazy psychopath, eaten out with insecurity. In the poem the warmth and sophistication of the Duke’s monolog draw the reader sympathetically into his world. Readers become actively involved in the egoism, haughtiness, and generosity of a proud Renaissance Duke. However, the irony of the poem every minute undermines this way of regarding situation, and awakens readers’ critical abilities. While the Duke describes how he murdered his first duchess quietly because she failed to focus her whole existence on him, readers see his unreasonableness; while he describes his generosity to his first wife, readers see his selfish desire to control another person within the confines of his own pleasures. According to the Duke his first wife was too easily made happy, too freewill, lacking in aristocratic haughtiness or composure: Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough For calling up that spot of joy. She had A heart how shall I say? too soon made glad, Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er She looked on, and her looks went everywhere. She enjoyed many aspects of her life at court, and (as the Duke asserts) failed absolutely to focus her attention on him sufficiently. The Duke stresses that she should have been focused on him, and on the importance of his aristocratic descent – his ‘nine-hundred-years-old name’. Still, however much the Duke knows about himself, the reader who listens to him knows more, and the dramatic irony—the difference between the character’s and the reader’s knowledge—runs against him and in reader’s favor. It is the reader who sees how horrible is his haughtiness and brutality. The Duke does not see this himself. He sees himself as a generous and noble expert of art. As the reader decodes the irony, the Duke appears as a madman who reduces people to objects. When the wife of the Duke failed to be a good wife, the Duke did not let himself go below his dignity to reason with her, or explain how her behavior irritated him. He simply had her calmly executed, and began to think about a second marriage. After he has euphemistically told the envoy how he ‘gave commands’, i.e. gave orders for her murder, he points to the portrait and says: â€Å"There she stands, As if alive.† The irony is unexpected and horrible. Browning’s poetic monologue is full of irony. The Duke discloses far more than he really says about himself. Throughout the whole monologue, the Duke speaks in a calm, firm, ironical tone. The line ‘The depth and passion of its earnest glance’ is spoken in intense irony. Only once or twice the reader sees the teeth of this monster flash, showing his horrible heart. When he speaks of the ‘officious fool’ who brought the cherries, and when he states ‘all smiles stopped together’; then the envoy looks at him with fear in his eyes, but the Duke’s face instantly resumes its mask of stone. Browning’s character in the poem is projecting one image of himself, but the ironic structure of the poem reveals to readers completely opposite image. Works Cited Browning, Robert. The Poems. Ed. John Pettigrew and Thomas J. Collins. New Haven: Yale UP, 1981.

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