Both Shakespeare and the great Romantic poet William Wordsworth used iambic pentameter without rhyme, a form called blank verse. Of course, although the iambic rhythm makes us think of Elizabethan drama, the rhymed couplets (pairs of rhymed lines that occur together) of the poem keep tying the Duke’s speech into tidy packages, even though his thoughts and sentences are untidy. He’s not speaking his thoughts aloud to himself while he’s alone, the way Hamlet does. "My Last Duchess" is more of a monologue than a soliloquy, because there is a character listening to the Duke in the poem. Browning, a very highly educated writer, knew this, and his decision to use this meter in a poem that already feels sort of like a play is a direct allusion to the patterns of monologues (speeches made to others) and soliloquies (speeches made while alone) in drama. The other thing about iambic pentameter, like we said before, is that Shakespeare and other Elizabethan dramatists used it in their plays. If you listen to someone read "My Last Duchess" aloud (check out our "Links" section for some online audio recordings by contemporary poets and scholars), you might not even notice that it has a fancy meter, because it sounds more like normal speech than some other poetry does. It also means that lines written in iambic pentameter feel conversational to us. Nobody’s ever really been able to prove this, and probably nobody ever will, but it’s a persistent "myth" about meter, so you should know it’s out there. Why does this matter? Well, for one thing, some people like to claim that iambic pentameter is the most "natural" rhythm for the English language to fall into, and that we often speak in iambic pentameter without noticing. Okay, okay, you could argue that "on" shouldn’t be stressed and so forth, but that’s the basic idea. Listen: "There’s MY last DUCHess HANGing ON the WALL" – that’s iambic pentameter. Pentameter means that there are five ("penta") of those in a line. It’s a hybrid of a play and a poem – a "dramatic lyric." As for meter, "My Last Duchess" uses the rhythm called "iambic pentameter." Iambic means that the rhythm is based on two-syllable units in which the first syllable is. "My Last Duchess" is what would happen if Shakespeare’s Macbeth married Wordsworth’s "Tintern Abbey" and they had a baby. So, really, Browning’s title Dramatic Lyrics says it all. That makes it more like the Romantic lyrics that came before it in the early part of the nineteenth century – stuff by Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley that are all about the mind of the individual. But it is about the inner thoughts of an individual speaker, instead of a dialogue between more than one person. Its rhymed iambic pentameter lines, like its dramatic setup, remind us of Shakespeare’s plays and other Elizabethan drama. "My Last Duchess" doesn’t read like a typical lyric poem. The "dramatic" part of the poem is obvious: it has fictional characters who act out a scene. The patriarchal Duke is extremely controlling over his former wife, the messenger and the reader too.Browning himself described this poem as a "dramatic lyric" – at least, Dramatic Lyrics was the title he gave to the book of poems in which "My Last Duchess" first appeared.He explains the problem he had with his disrespectful wife who was very flirtatious. The Duke shows off his wealth and status by making reference to his paintings and his reputation.The poem is about a Duke talking to a messenger who is there to help arrange his next marriage.Supposedly, he was dissatisfied with his wife, so he killed her and remarried. This poem shares similarities with the historical figure, Duke of Ferrara.
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