In “My Last Duchess” Robert Browning’s Duke seems to have been jealous of his former wife. Compare Browning’s treatment of this idea with the same theme in one other pre-1914 poem and two poems by Carol Ann Duffy or Simon Armitage.
“My Last Duchess” opens with the speaker, the Duke, inviting his visitor to admire a painting of his ex-wife: “I call
That piece a wonder”
He seems to treasure
“The depth and passion of its earnest glance”
and we might expect in this early part of the poem that the painting helps him to recall the serious love of his (dead?) wife fondly.
The painting is so important to him that he rarely allows other people to view it – it is hidden by a curtain, and he is the only person permitted to reveal the painting. By now we may start to feel alarmed: why does he want to hide his ex-wife from view?
Gradually the reason emerges: he was, and still is, jealous of her, because her joy came not just from her husband’s company. She was “too easily impressed”, and “her looks went everywhere.” Her fault, in his eyes, was that she considered pleasing him no more important than enjoying the sunset, eating cherries or riding her horse.
She failed to give him the attention he craved, and worse still, she took no account of his breeding, his nine hundred years old family name. Yet he could not tell her of his displeasure because that would mean stooping to her level, “and I choose
never to stoop.”
His jealousy at her constant smiling grew and grew, until the sinister conclusion:
“I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together.”
The Duke dismisses her fate, presumed dead, coldly, abruptly, as he admires instead a bronze statue which he has been able to bend to his will.
In “The Song of the Old Mother”, in contrast, we feel not horror but sympathy. Her envy is directed at the young. Her lament is brief, despairing, almost monosyllabic, which gives the poem a tone of slow, sad resignation.
She describes in simple language her chores: rising early, lighting the fire, cleaning, cooking. Her life holds no pleasures, unlike those of the young, whose only thoughts are of trivial matters:
“the matching of ribbons for bosom and head”
The poem ends in a bitter couplet which points up her passive resignation, with the powerful rhyming of “old” and “cold” to emphasise the burden of age and “the seed of the fire” of her life dying feebly away.
The protagonist of “Education for Leisure” seems younger, filled with envy of the whole world. He (his simple speech, the emphasis on “I”, and the tendency to violence sound more male than female) expresses his frustration at the outset:
“Today I am going to kill something. Anything.”
Because he is constantly ignored, he, like the Duke, is determined to take control, to play God with other creatures’ lives. His aggression increases in scale, from crushing a fly to flushing away a goldfish. At first his threats have a humorous edge, when the cat and the budgie try to escape him.
However, his self-delusion is growing rapidly. He believes he is a genius, and is desperate to be noticed by “them” as one:
“I breathe out talent on the glass to write my name.”
When the people at the job centre and the radio presenter spurn his autograph and his “superstar” status, something snaps inside him.
The poem ends in four sudden, short sentences laden with danger:
“The pavements glitter suddenly. I touch your arm.”
The violent assault comes earlier in “Hitcher”, enabling the reader to feel the weight of the speaker’s callous indifference to the life he has ended. Bored by his job, and jealous of his hitch-hiker’s untroubled attitude to life,
“following the sun to west from east”
he attacks him, repeatedly, gratuitously, and ejects him from the moving car.
The speaker is proud of the skill with which he dispatched his victim – “didn’t even swerve” – rather than showing any remorse. On the contrary, having watched him
“bouncing off the kerb”
he concludes with a vengeful, harsh farewell, completely out of touch with reality, just like the killer in “Education for Leisure”:
“Stitch that, I remember thinking,
you can walk from there.”
In both poems, as in “My Last Duchess”, we find little to like or sympathise with in the central figure because he reveals no emotions other than naked envy or jealousy.
“My Last Duchess” opens with the speaker, the Duke, inviting his visitor to admire a painting of his ex-wife: “I call
That piece a wonder”
He seems to treasure
“The depth and passion of its earnest glance”
and we might expect in this early part of the poem that the painting helps him to recall the serious love of his (dead?) wife fondly.
The painting is so important to him that he rarely allows other people to view it – it is hidden by a curtain, and he is the only person permitted to reveal the painting. By now we may start to feel alarmed: why does he want to hide his ex-wife from view?
Gradually the reason emerges: he was, and still is, jealous of her, because her joy came not just from her husband’s company. She was “too easily impressed”, and “her looks went everywhere.” Her fault, in his eyes, was that she considered pleasing him no more important than enjoying the sunset, eating cherries or riding her horse.
She failed to give him the attention he craved, and worse still, she took no account of his breeding, his nine hundred years old family name. Yet he could not tell her of his displeasure because that would mean stooping to her level, “and I choose
never to stoop.”
His jealousy at her constant smiling grew and grew, until the sinister conclusion:
“I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together.”
The Duke dismisses her fate, presumed dead, coldly, abruptly, as he admires instead a bronze statue which he has been able to bend to his will.
In “The Song of the Old Mother”, in contrast, we feel not horror but sympathy. Her envy is directed at the young. Her lament is brief, despairing, almost monosyllabic, which gives the poem a tone of slow, sad resignation.
She describes in simple language her chores: rising early, lighting the fire, cleaning, cooking. Her life holds no pleasures, unlike those of the young, whose only thoughts are of trivial matters:
“the matching of ribbons for bosom and head”
The poem ends in a bitter couplet which points up her passive resignation, with the powerful rhyming of “old” and “cold” to emphasise the burden of age and “the seed of the fire” of her life dying feebly away.
The protagonist of “Education for Leisure” seems younger, filled with envy of the whole world. He (his simple speech, the emphasis on “I”, and the tendency to violence sound more male than female) expresses his frustration at the outset:
“Today I am going to kill something. Anything.”
Because he is constantly ignored, he, like the Duke, is determined to take control, to play God with other creatures’ lives. His aggression increases in scale, from crushing a fly to flushing away a goldfish. At first his threats have a humorous edge, when the cat and the budgie try to escape him.
However, his self-delusion is growing rapidly. He believes he is a genius, and is desperate to be noticed by “them” as one:
“I breathe out talent on the glass to write my name.”
When the people at the job centre and the radio presenter spurn his autograph and his “superstar” status, something snaps inside him.
The poem ends in four sudden, short sentences laden with danger:
“The pavements glitter suddenly. I touch your arm.”
The violent assault comes earlier in “Hitcher”, enabling the reader to feel the weight of the speaker’s callous indifference to the life he has ended. Bored by his job, and jealous of his hitch-hiker’s untroubled attitude to life,
“following the sun to west from east”
he attacks him, repeatedly, gratuitously, and ejects him from the moving car.
The speaker is proud of the skill with which he dispatched his victim – “didn’t even swerve” – rather than showing any remorse. On the contrary, having watched him
“bouncing off the kerb”
he concludes with a vengeful, harsh farewell, completely out of touch with reality, just like the killer in “Education for Leisure”:
“Stitch that, I remember thinking,
you can walk from there.”
In both poems, as in “My Last Duchess”, we find little to like or sympathise with in the central figure because he reveals no emotions other than naked envy or jealousy.
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