Comparison in the Voice Presentation in The River God, My Last Duchess and The Hunchback in the Park - Essay Example

Discussion In the River God, the voice of the poem is the personified river, labeled a deity due to the power he wields over people and objects to bestow both blessings and death. The river’s voice is projected as being masculine, as shown by his stated preference for women to bathe in him. The voice in the poem My Last Duchess is that of the Duke talking about his previous wife. The masculinity of the character is obvious here, though overtones of exaggerated manliness and chauvinistic tendencies radiate even from the title.

The use of “my” to refer to the duchess indicates possessiveness, as though she was an object. The voice in The Hunchback in the Park can be said to be that of the poet as a child, recollecting memories of a hunchback he used to see in the park. The opening lines refer to him as a solitary mister, setting the tone for further descriptions of the misery and loneliness the narrator witnessed the hunchback enduring (TES 2011). The River God is structured as one unbroken stanza, giving the effect of a flowing river.

Lines cross over into others with no break, a feature called enjambment. Rhyming is present in the poem. My Last Duchess is a prime example of dramatic monologue, where events are narrated to a listener as they unfolded. The poem also employs enjambment and features rhymes in its iambic pentameter structure. The Hunchback of the Park also follows the pattern by lacking definite punctuation or regular rhyme scheme. The overall effect in all the three poems is that the plot of the story being told is driven forward by the changing moods that are depicted by the irregularities in lines and stanzas.

The musical flow of all the poems is however still guaranteed by the constant rhyming present in all of them (TES 2011). The tone of the poems is in constant flux, changing either from jolly and ordinary to cold and brutal as the poem progresses, as in the first two: River God and My Last Duchess. In the former, the River talks about ordinary, river experiences at the beginning, but mentions how he drowned a beautiful lady to keep her with him forever. The latter poem also starts out somewhat casually with the Duke discussing a wall-painting of his Duchess and how beautiful and jolly she is.

As the poem progresses, the Duke’s intense jealousy and petty arrogance are revealed to have led him to order her death as he suspected her of infidelity. The two poems hence start out normal but take a turn for the macabre. The two masculine voices consider themselves to wield godly power and control the fate of others. They both seem to not only brazenly boast of, but take pleasure in murder. The tone of The Hunchback however does the opposite, starting out sad and depressing, but ending with a ray of hope for the hunchback as he loses himself in his imaginary world with his imaginary woman.

The hunchback is not even regarded as human but more of an animal, as his abode is referred to as a “kennel”. He endures taunts and jibes from the boys in the park, his only respite being nighttime (TES 2011). As is the inherent nature of poems, the implications of the words used may not seem straightforward at first, but understanding the host of allusions,