Monologue In My Last Duchess

In the dramatic monologue ‘My Last Duchess’ by Robert Browning, the way in which the poet presents the Duke’s attitude to the death of his Duchess is distinct from the beginning of the piece. Browning presents the Duke as unnaturally complacent and unfazed when he talks about his wife’s abrupt demise, however towards the end of the poem the Duke appears to let down his façade, becoming smug and almost proud of his actions as it becomes apparent that he in fact killed her. The monologue is about a Duke reminiscing about his lost wife, a loving memory morphs into malicious judgment and a chilling confession. His composed perspective towards death is apparent in the first two lines, ‘That’s my last Duchess… if she were alive’, in this quote Browning uses iambic pentameter, this literary device shows the Duke’s abnormal steadiness in the situation, by

The poem is spoken by Heaney himself as a young boy bearing witness to the funeral of his dear brother. ‘At two o’clock our neighbours drove me home’ this shows how the community came together to cope with the grief of the death of his brother showing that the attitude towards dying portrayed in Heaney’s poem is that of strength in numbers, particularly in the Irish community which the family was based . The figurative sense of grieving alone is present when Heaney ‘…met my father crying…’ as the poem does not show an interaction between the two, it is emotionally cataclysmic because his father (a customarily strong man who has, ‘always taken funerals in his stride’) is overwhelmed with grief for his young son yet not residing in or supporting the sentimental turmoil of his living son. This deeply embeds the attitude of solidary mourning in the