Literary analysis of poetry - Essay Example

The title of the poem gives the opportunity to the reader to guess the main idea of the plot of the story. The pronoun “my” hints that the poem is the first person narration. The word “Duchess” reminds him the bygone period of the Italian Renaissance and informs, that the main characters are noble people. “My last Duchess” was considered as a “dramatic lyric”. However, it does not possess the typical features of lyric. Its dramatic characteristics remind the audience about the famous works of Shakespeare.

The poem rather introduces the style of “romantic lyric”, which appeared in the beginning of the XIX century. According to the article “Subjugation of Women in Robert Brownings Selected Poems” - “Robert Browning is one the greatest poets of the Victorian era. He employs dramatic monologue as a powerful tool to explain some historical happenings and also present ordinary things in a dramatic way. He takes up real characters to represent real nature of men and women. He picks up characters from all varieties of social strata such as cowards, rogues, scholars, artists, cheats, murderers, saints etc.

Themes of his poems are love, excessive love, art, artistic beauty, religion, philosophy, nature and human nature and so on» (2013). The events of the story “My last Duchess” take place during the period of late Renaissance. The main character of the poem, the Duke of Ferrara invites the emissary of the family of his potential wife to his house and show them his paintings. While examining them he pays special attention to the portrait of the women, his last wife. The women is represented as a beautiful, cheerful and smiling lady.

The Duke of Ferrara described her as the flirtatious person, who gave her smiles to everyone, making him displeased by these actions. The owner of the painting complained that nobody could understand his sorrow. At this