The Last Duchess By Browning

I found the poem very surreal at first, in how it starts and then slowly unfolds to become a story of tragedy towards the middle an ending.

In every poem I have read of Browning’s, I find that he has the tendency of making a story of tragedy seem so calm and wonderfully beautiful in the beginning, then bringing the tragic murderous characters, who add that certain type of  sinister feeling towards it, what seems to be a story, being described in the form of the poem. Reading it seems like the character is a man, who describes the way he had so much love for a woman that he murdered near the end of this poem but also talking about how he held ‘My Duchess’ as a possession keeping her beauty away from the staring eyes but his. And that she was somewhat of an intimidating and overshadowing character that to attain his dominance from their relationship wanted to solely possess her. It’s as if she does not feel that anything he says to her is relevant to what she wants ‘In speech – Which I have not – to make your will quite clear to such an one, and say, just this Or that in you disgust me; here you miss or there exceed the mark’ – and if she let Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set Her wits to yours, forsooth and made excuse, E’en then would be some stooping; and I choose never to stoop. This just indicates that they seem to get into a lot of arguments which resulted in him succumbing to her authority in a way because he chooses ‘Never to stoop’.

Quoting ‘how such a glance came there; so not the first,

                 Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir ‘twas not

                 Her husband’s presence only called that spot

                 Of joy into the Duchess’ cheek.

Using the quote it does seem that she was not happy in seeing her husband for reasons that he was trying to force affection from her, always thinking that And I quote ‘ She ranked my gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name with anybody’s gift. This to me tells me that he might want her for himself, thinking that, by showering her with the most expensive worldly objects she will be ‘Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er, she looked on, and her looks went everywhere’. To me it seems that though she seems easily impressed it only for the things described in stanza 24 as’ the dropping of daylight in the west, the bough of cherries’, then moving on into stanza 26, where it starts with ‘the white mule she with round the terrace – all each would draw from her alike the approving speech, or blush at least, she thanked men – good! But thanked somehow – I know not how’. Again it seems that he is so controlling that the amount of attention she gets form them men that do admire her beauty, makes him so paranoid that he has to ask himself how she thanked them. Was it a smile or through some other form of appreciation?