“My Last Duchess” and Other Poems
“My Last Duchess” and Other Poems
THE LITERARY WORK
Four poems—one set in sixteenth-century Italy, three set in an unspecified lime and place; published in 1842, in 1846, and one in 1864 (the middle two originally-published together as one poem, “Night and Morning”).
SYNOPSIS
In “My Last Duchess,” an Italian duke relates the history of his previous marriage to an emissary; in “Meeting at Night” and “Parting at Morning,” a man trysts with his lover by night and leaves her in the morning; in “Frospice,” a male speaker envisions his death and the afterlife.
Events in History at the Time of the Poems
Born in Camberwell, London, in 1812, Robert Browning was the son of a bank clerk, a learned man who kept an extensive library. Browning attended a boarding school near Camberwell as a boy, and later attended the University of London for a time. However, he preferred to pursue his education at home. Aside from being tutored in subjects such as foreign languages, music, boxing, and riding, Browning read widely. His diverse interests provided him with a store of knowledge from which he drew when composing his poems. In 1833 Browning published his first poem, Pauline, anonymously: the work failed to sell and went virtually unnoticed by critics. Browning took trips to Russia in 1834 and Italy in 1837, from which he would draw for future poems. Pauline was followed by Paracelsus (1835); published at Browning’s father’s expense, it too was ignored, and Sordello (1840) was a critical failure that actually impeded Browning’s poetic reputation. Browning briefly experimented with writing plays, but soon abandoned the stage, though his fascination with the dramatic monologue appears to date from that time. Between 1841 and 1846, Browning produced an eight-volume series of poetic pamphlets, Bells and Pomegranates. In the series was a collection of monologues that included “My Last Duchess”; also in the series was Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845), which contained the companion poems “Meeting at Night” and “Parting at Morning.” Browning undertook a correspondence with the poet Elizabeth Barrett, whom he married a year later. The couple afterwards emigrated from England to Italy, where Browning sets “My Last Duchess.”
Events in History at the Time of the Poems
Victorians and the past
The Victorian interest in the past found its most dramatic expression in the growing fascination with medievalism, which can be traced back to the late 1700s. Scholars, antiquarians, and artists of the Romantic period fell increasingly under the spell of the Middle Ages, taking its artifacts, architecture, legends, and values to heart. As early as the eighteenth century, medieval people came to be regarded by some artists and intellectuals as more vital, uncorrupted, and closer to nature than their modern counterparts, a belief that persisted well into the nineteenth century and the onset of the Victorian Age. As rapidly advancing technology transformed England from a primarily agricultural nation into a major industrial power, many Victorians turned nostalgically to contemplation of the medieval world for a sense of harmony and stability that eluded them in the present. The literature of the times often reflected authors’ sympathy with the medieval period, from the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott to the Arthurian poems of Lord Tennyson and William Morris. Ever an original, Robert Browning was not among the poets who became enamored of medieval subjects and legends. One literary scholar observes that, “In an age when the poets were mostly interested in escaping to the past . . ., Browning almost alone wrote of contemporary ideas and contemporary life, often in colloquial and contemporary phrase” (DeVane, p. 282). Another scholar argues that Browning did a brilliant job of evoking earlier periods than his own, but for him, the qualities of vigor, variety, sweeping change, and unfettered imagination “belong[ed] primarily to the Renaissance and later periods”; moreover, Browning’s poems set in the past evinced an interest in “a world of history more than a world of myth or literary legend” (Taylor in Peterson, pp. 58, 61). His duke in “My Last Duchess” seems representative of a particular Renaissance type, with values peculiar to that specific time period and society, rather than as a hero of timeless legend. He also bears a striking resemblance to a particular duke.
The real duke of Ferrara
Although Browning’s arrogant, autocratic duke in “My Last Duchess” is an original creation in many respects, the poet drew at least in part on his knowledge of the powerful Este family, who ruled Ferrara, a duchy in northern Italy. Browning did not actually visit Ferrara when he traveled through Italy in June 1838, but he had read extensively on its history while composing his poem, Sordello. At the same time, Browning was engaged in reviewing R. H. Wilde’s Conjectures and Researches concerning the Love Madness and Imprisonment of Torquato Tasso; Browning’s research into the life of Tasso—an Italian poet—uncovered the figure of Alfonso II, fifth and last duke of Ferrara, who was Tasso’s patron and the one who consigned him to a mental hospital after the poet experienced delusions and exhibited violent behavior.
Alfonso II (1533-1597) was the son of Ercole II and Renee of France. As the scion of a noble family and the heir to a dukedom, Alfonso received an extensive literary and social education, mastering such languages as Latin and French and devoting himself to courtly pursuits like hunting, fighting in tourneys, and attending plays and festivals. Owing to his French ancestry, Alfonso was sympathetic to France as a nation. He defied his father—who wanted his duchy Ferrara to remain neutral—by fighting beside his French cousin, Henry II, in a war against Charles V, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. With the help of Cosimo I de Medici, Duke of Tuscany, the father, èrcole II managed to negotiate a peace with the emperor that included restoration of confiscated Ferrara lands. To strengthen the alliance between the Este and the de Medici families, Alfonso, then 25 years old, entered into an arranged marriage with Cosimo’s 14-year-old daughter, Lucrezia de Medici, in 1558. Three days after the wedding, Alfonso returned to France, where he continued to fight in Henry II’s wars.
After the death of èrcole II in 1559, Alfonso returned to Ferrara to assume his responsibilities as duke. In February 1560, Alfonso II sent for his wife—described as a serious, devout girl of not much education—to join him. Extensive details of their marriage are not known but Lucrezia, then 17, died on April 21, 1561. There were suspicions—which remained unproven— that she had been poisoned. Soon after Lucrezia’s death, Alfonso began negotiating with Ferdinand, Count of Tyrol and son of Emperor Ferdinand I of Austria, for the hand of the emperor’s daughter, Barbara. Ferdinand used an envoy— Nikolaus Madriz of Innsbruk—to negotiate the match to its successful conclusion. The marriage between Alfonso II and Barbara of Austria took place in 1565. Like her predecessor, Barbara died young—in 1572—and, like the duke’s first marriage, his second was without issue. Alfonso then married Margherita Gonzaga in 1579 but she too bore him no children. Although Alfonso tried to have his illegitimate cousin Cesare named as his successor, his efforts were ultimately unsuccessful, in large part because of a papal bull (decree) in 1567 that prevented the investiture of illegitimate heirs with church lands. With the death of Alfonso II, the male line of the House of Este in Ferrara became extinct and the duchy reverted to the possession of the Church. The court of Ferrara—among the most brilliant in Italy for 200 years—fell into eclipse.
Browning did not name the duke and duchess in the first published version of his poem—it was not until 1849 that he added the subtitled “Ferrara” to “My Last Duchess.” But the situation of the speaker negotiating for a new bride through a count’s envoy encourages identification with the story of Alphonso II and Lucrezia de Medici. Literary scholar William Clyde De-Vane observes, “In almost every respect Alfonso II meets the requirements of Browning’s Duke. He was a typical Renaissance grandee: he came of the proud Este family, rulers in Italy for hundreds of years, not merchants and upstarts like the Medici; he was cold and egotistical, vengeful and extremely possessive; and a patron of the arts, painting, music, and literature” (DeVane, p. 108). While it is unclear how closely Browning’s duchess resembles Lucrezia de Medici, the circumstances surrounding both women’s deaths remain mysterious. Asked about his duchess’s fate, Browning refused to commit himself to a definitive explanation. The poem’s lines in which the duke “gave commands;/Then all smiles stopped together” prompted a question to Browning about what happened to her (Browning, Poetry, “My Last Duchess,” line 46). In response, the poet first said that “the commands were that she should be put to death,” then almost immediately added, “or he might have had her shut up in a convent” (Browning in DeVane, p. 109).
Public vs. private life
Despite their brevity, Browning’s companion poems “Meeting at Night” and “Parting at Morning”—originally published together in 1845 as one poem “Night and Morning”—comment on the middle-class Victorian drive toward separate public and private lives.
ART AND PATRONAGE
Renaissance princes were often patrons of the arts and the Estes of Ferrara were no exception, their collection of adornments in an already splendid court benefiting from their generous support of talented painters and poets. Alfonso I, third duke of Ferrara and grandfather to Alfonso II, was a patron to several painters, including Dosso Dossi, Giovanni Bellini, Titian, and Raphael. In the last case, the relationship between patron and artist did not always run smoothly. At one point, Raphael promised to paint a picture for AJfonso I (A Triumph of the Bacchus in India), but Raphael already had so many commissions in Rome (hat he never even started it. Three years later, the angry duke wrote to the Ferrara ambassador in Rome;
We wish you to find him and tell him . . . that it is now three years since he has given us only words; and that this is not the way to treat men or our rank; and that, if he does not fulfill his promise toward us, we shall make him know that he has not done well to deceive us. And then, as though from yourself, you can tell him that he had better take care not to provoke our hatred, instead of the love we bear him; for as, It he keeps his promise, he can hope (or our support, so on the contrary, if he does not, he can expect one day to get what he will not like.
(Alfonso I in Prescott, p. 236)
In Browning’s poem, the duke of Ferrara is a patron to two artists: monastic painter Fra Pandolf, who paints the portrait of the last duchess, and the sculptor Claus, or” Innsbruck, who crafted a statue of Neptune taming a seahorse. Both artists are imaginary, although a painter named Giovanni Antonio Pandects was employed by the Este family to paint a portrait ot Alfonso ll’s sister in 1570, and classical subjects in sculpture— such as Neptune taming a sea horse—were typical of the period.
They are indeed something of a parody of this desire. In general, the middle class created a mythology of individual spheres of existence consisting of the world of work, duty, and service—dominated by men—and the world of home and domestic concerns (and love), traditionally the province of women. In a famous 1865 lecture, the Victorian intellectual John Ruskin described, albeit from a very conservative point of view, gender roles prescribed for middle-class couples:
The man’s power is active, progressive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is for speculation and invention; his energy for adventure, for war, and for conquest whenever war is just, whenever conquest is necessary. But the woman’s power is for rule, not for battle— and her intellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision. . . . The man, in his rough work in the open world, must encounter all peril and trial. But he guards the woman from all this, within his house, as ruled by her, unless she herself has sought it, need enter no danger, no temptation, no cause of error or offence. This is the true nature of home—it is the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division.
(Ruskin in Mitchell, p. 266)
According to this broadly painted conception, middle-class men were considered the breadwinners and warriors of public life, and women were often designated the guardians of private
FROM “THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE” BY COVENTRY PATMORE
Becoming one of the best-selling poems in Victorian England, “The Angel in the House (1854-56} concerns a husband’s intense love for his wife, describing their courtship and marriage. The poem reveals little about the nature of Victorian home life but fully expresses the feminine ideal of woman being queen of the domestic sphere, a separate world in which she “exercised) power in secret and subtle ways” (Hellerstein, et al, p. T 34).
Why, having won her, do I woof . . .
Because, although in act and word
As lowly as a wife can be,
Her manners, when they call me lord,
Remind me tis by courtesy . . .
Because, though free of the outer court
I am, this Temple keeps its shrine
Sacred to Heaven; because, in short,
She’s not and never can be mine.
(Patoore in Hellerstein,, pp. 139-40)
Life. How far these myths extended into actual lives or even into a general belief system is unclear, but one feminine ideal of the mid-nineteenth century was the Angel in the House, a term derived from the title of a popular Victorian poem by Coventry Pat more. According to the poem (as often parodied as it was honored), this self-sacrificing domestic saint devoted herself entirely to the affairs of her household, tended to the needs of her husband and children, and provided through her own pure morals an example of Christian virtues in action. This Angel in the House never questioned her position nor attempted to prevent the men in her family from assuming their own places in the outside world. Some moralists of the day, such as Baldwin Brown, praised “women whose hearts are an unfailing fountain of courage and inspiration to the hard-pressed man . . . and who send forth husband or brother each morning with new strength for his conflict, armed, as the lady armed her knight of old, with a shield which he may not stain in any unseemly conflicts, and a sword which he dares only use against the enemies of truth, righteousness, and God” (Baldwin in Houghton, pp. 351-352). The Angel in the House also respected the boundary between public and private life: she kept the softer emotions, especially love, confined to the home so that the man in the family could perform his work in the world without distractions. Of course, this figure was in large part a projection of somewhat sappy wishful thinking, and many Victorians, Browning included, recognized the menacing patriarchal power lurking behind the adoration.
In Browning’s companion poems, the heady bliss of a private romantic encounter—as two lovers tryst in a farmhouse, their “two hearts beating each to each!” (Browning, Poetry, “Meeting at Night,” line 12)—gives way to a presumably inevitable separation as the sun rises and the male lover recalls “the need of a world of men for me” (Browning, Poetry, “Parting at Morning,” line 4). Many years after these poems appeared in print, Browning was asked if the speaker was a woman lamenting the departure of her lover or else the loss of her purity. Browning replied, “Neither: it is his confession of how fleeting is the belief (implied in the first part) that such raptures are self-sufficient and enduring—as for the time they appear” (Browning in DeVane, p. 178). Browning thus casts these poems as existential laments, resisting the comfortable gender politics by which they often were (and are) read.
Religious doubt and certainty
At the start of the Victorian Age, many Dissenting Christians in England, that is, many of those who dissented from the mainstream Anglican Church, tended towards a literal reading of the Bible. They considered the Scriptures infallible and free of error; challenging this belief at the time was geological evidence and linguistic criticism, developed especially in Germany, which traced changes and inconsistencies in key texts. Meanwhile, scholars were conducting their own investigations, comparing biblical events with historical records and exploring, from an archaeological standpoint, the lifestyles in ancient cultures, like those of Egypt and Palestine.
Religious certainties were further undermined by sectarian conflicts, several of which originated in the earliest decades of the nineteenth century. One such conflict involved Utilitarianism—a philosophy founded by Jeremy Bentham (1772-1832)—which held that all institutions of society should be examined in the light of reason to discern whether they were “useful,” that is, contributed to the greatest happiness of the greatest numbers. Benthamite Utilitarian tended to agree that established religion was not useful, but rather an outmoded superstition. This viewpoint, in turn, was challenged by religious conservatives, like John Henry Newman, who insisted that a powerful, dogmatic, and traditional religious institution was the best defense against mechanistic and secular Benthamitism. Other scholars and intellectuals—including Thomas Carlyle— abandoned institutional Christianity but held that people needed some kind of religious faith to sustain them.
As a result of these ongoing religious debates, coupled with the emergence of scientific theories such as Charles Darwin’s theory of human evolution, many Victorians suffered crises of faith. “Doubt arose . because of evangelical religion’s emphasis on progress and reform. Was it really possible to accept the idea of hell, everlasting punishment, and a jealous deity who demanded obedience? The struggles to reconcile conflicting beliefs gave religion its active presence in many lives—and often, when faith failed, the struggle to live well by works of reform grew even stronger” (Mitchell, p. 247). Doubtless some Victorians came to believe that their reward, their claim to immortality, would rest on their accomplishments in the earthly world, rather than whatever they were granted in a possibly nonexistent heaven. The scholar Walter E. Houghton cogently sums up this position: “There may be a God—and maybe not. And if there is, is there a life after death? in a heaven? or a hell? Let us forget the insoluble questions and plunge into some useful career” (Houghton, p. 258).
Despite this resolve, questions about the nature of God, the afterlife, and immortality continued to vex and trouble Victorian thinkers and writers, including Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning. Both poets explored the nature of spiritual crises in their works—Tennyson, most notably, in his famous elegy, In Memoriam (also in WLAIT 4: British and Irish Literature and Its Times). Browning was to return time and again to the subject of faith in such poems as “Cleon,” “Karshish,” and “Saul.” After facing his own religious doubts in his younger years, the mature Browning explored many positions, ranging from satiric nihilism (in his poem “Caliban Upon Setebos”) to a kind of stoicism, close to belief. In “Prosice,” composed soon after the death of Browning’s wife, the speaker, imagining his own death, envisions an afterlife in which love somehow survives.
The Poems in Focus
The contents
“My Last Duchess” begins as the Duke of Ferrara points out to his listener the lifelike portrait of his late wife. Inviting the listener to “sit and look at her,” Ferrara mentions the artist, Fra Pandolt, and remarks on how strangers who beheld the portrait seemed mesmerized by “the depth and passion of [the duchess’s] earnest glance” and curious about how she came to wear such an expression (“My Last Duchess,” lines 5, 8). Ferrara reveals that the flush on the duchess’s cheek might have been evoked not only by her husband’s presence but by Fra Pandolfs compliments.
Warming to his theme, Ferrara describes his late wife as having “a heart—how shall I say? too soon made glad,/Too easily impressed; she liked whatever/She looked on, and her looks went everywhere” (“My Last Duchess,” lines 22-24). The duke goes on to list the many things that pleased the duchess, ranging from wearing her husband’s favour, to sunsets, boughs of cherries, and white mules. He recalls how his wife seemed to thank men as though their gifts to her were all of the same value, including the duke’s own gift of “a nine-hundred-years-old name” (“My Last Duchess,” line 32). Ferrara wonders aloud how a man in his exalted position could criticize this habit of the duchess without somehow lowering or embarrassing himself in the process: “Even then would be some stooping; and I choose/Never to stoop” (“My Last Duchess,” lines 42-43).
After noticing how the duchess’s smiles seem bestowed on everyone she encounters, Ferrara reveals that he “gave commands;/Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands/As if alive” (“My Last Duchess,” lines 45-47). Immediately after that disclosure, the duke addresses his visitor—now identified as an envoy of a count, whose daughter Ferrara wishes to wed if she comes with the desired dowry. He invites the envoy to rise and go with him to meet the rest of the company downstairs. As Ferrara insists that he and the envoy go together, he points out to him a final masterpiece in his art collection: “Notice Neptune, though,/Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,/Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!” (“My Last Duchess,” lines 54-56).
“Meeting At Night” begins as a man sails eagerly by moonlight towards a distant cove. Leaving his boat on the sands, he hurries across “a mile of warm, sea-scented beach” and three fields to reach a farm. He taps at the pane to be let in, a match is quickly struck, and his lover welcomes him with equal fervor. However, as the companion poem “Parting at Morning” reveals, when the sun rises, the male lover prepares for his inevitable departure and the resumption of his worldly duties: “And the sun looked over the mountain’s rim:/And straight was a path of gold for him,/and the need of a world of men for me” (“Parting at Morning,” lines 14-16).
“Prospice”—-meaning “look forward”—opens with the question “Fear death?” and segues into the speaker’s vision of what he might experience after death: “The power of the night, the press of the storm,/The post of the foe;/“Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,/Yet the strong man must go” (Browning, Poetry, “Prospice,” lines 5-8). The speaker senses that “a battle’s to fight ere the guerdon be gained”; he welcomes the impending conflict, “I was ever a fighter, so—one fight more,/The best and the last” (“Prospice,” lines 13-15). Determined to face death bravely, like “the heroes of old,” the speaker imagines the darkness and pain yielding ultimately to joy and a reunion with his lost love:
And the elements’ rage, the fiend-voices that rage,
Shall dwindle, shall blend,
Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain,
Then a light, then thy breast,
O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,
And with God be the rest!
(“Prospice,” lines 23-28)
Victorian love
Overall, Victorians of the vocal but still small middle class tended to speak of love in highly idealized terms. As opposed to lust and sensuality, love—which presumably led to marriage and children—purified and strengthened the (male) lover against sin and temptation. Love represented “not only the supreme experience of life but its end and object—the very means by which the soul is saved” (Houghton, p. 373). Lovers’ lives were defined by the moment in which each met and recognized the other as
The one person in the wide world who was made for him or her, made to be loved forever, here and hereafter. After finding one’s affinity, to draw back . . . out of timidity or apathy or any consideration of ‘the world’s honors,’ is failure in life. Success is to seize the predestined moment and love on, even if love is unrequited . . . even if the beloved is dead—always to be faithful until, in heaven, the perfect union is achieved or renewed.
(Houghton, pp. 373-74)
The literature of love, as written in the 1840s and 1850s, often seems to reflect (or mock) what might be called the official line on love: “Love is not something carnal and evil to be ashamed of but something pure and beautiful; it is not a temptation to be struggled against but a great ethical force which can protect men from lust and even strengthen and purify the mortal will” (Houghton, p. 375).
Much of Browning’s verse falls within the purview of love poetry and engages these notions in many ways, usually playfully or ironically. While the exact nature of the lovers’ relationship in “Meeting at Night” is never specified, the headlong ecstasy of the man to reach his beloved is, at least on one level, presented sympathetically, even exultantly, and with imagery that slyly suggests a consummation even before the reunion: “And the startled little waves that leap/In fiery ringlets from their sleep,/As I gain the cove with pushing prow,/And quench its speed i’ the slushy sand” (“Meeting at Night,” line 3-6). Meanwhile, “Prospice” captures the Victorian ideal of the perfect love that transcends death itself when the speaker reunites with his beloved— “thou soul of my soul!” (“Prospice,” line 27)—at the poem’s conclusion.
Sources and literary context
While researching the historical background of his poem Sordello, Browning discovered the Este family of Ferrara, particularly the figure of Alfonso II, the real-life model for the duke in “My Last Duchess.” His sources most likely included Biographie universelle (1822)—a reference text Browning had consulted on several previous occasions—and Muratori’s Della Antichita Estensi, both of which Browning had also used for Bordello. R. H. Wilde’s Conjectures and Researches concerning the Love Madness and Imprisonment of Torquato Tasso, of which Browning was writing a review in spring of 1842, may have provided further details on Alfonso II, who was Torquato Tasso’s patron.
Even a resoundingly unromantic poem like “My Last Duchess” can be explored in the context of Victorian love. The duke, however oddly sympathetic, is the exact antithesis of the ideal Victorian lover, a man who has in fact failed in his life because he cared too much for “the world’s honors,” specifically, his “gift of a nine-hundred years’ old name” (“My Last Duchess,” line 33). “Browning, observes one literary historian, could not have created the complex ironies of ‘My Last Duchess’ (1842)—in which the Duke complains about the inadequacy of his first wife while negotiating the dowry for his second—if he had not been able to set the Victorian reader’s presumed expectations about marital relations against the duke’s renaissance views” (Tucker, p. 89). Ferrara and his first wife seem emotionally and spiritually incompatible. Possessive and arrogant, the duke cannot tolerate, understand, or love a duchess who prizes sunsets, white mules, and cherry-boughs at the same worth as his own offerings, nor one who smiles upon all whom she beholds. Having rid himself of her, the duke chooses to concentrate instead upon his art collection, including the portrait of the duchess, which he can control as he never could the living woman. Even the bride he now courts is to become another piece in his collection, as he assures the envoy that “[the Count’s] fair daughter’s self, as I avowed/at starting, is my object” (“My Last Duchess,” lines 52-53).
The companion poems “Meeting at Night” and “Parting at Morning” do not appear to be rooted in any historical situation. “Prospice,” by contrast, shows definite autobiographical influences: it was written shortly after the death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in 1861 and was interpreted as an expression of Browning’s own ideas about love and immortality transcending death. Well aware of his wife’s failing health, Browning nursed her patiently and devotedly through her final illness: she died in his arms. Writing to inform his father and sister of Elizabeth’s death, Browning told them not to worry about him and asserted that his own life was to be devoted to the upbringing of his son, and that something of Elizabeth’s spirit still sustained him, “I have some of her strength, really, added to mine”; in a postscript, Browning reflected on
THE ROMANCE OF THE CENTURY?
During the mid-1840s, Robert Browning became less famous tor his poetry than for the role he played in what has been considered one of the mosi famous love stories in the Victorian Age. In January 1845, Browning wrote his first letter to the poetess Elizabeth Barrett, six years his senior and a semi-invalid living in her father’s house. The letter was in response to a compliment she had paid his verse in one of her own poems (“Lady Grande’s Courtship”). Praising Barrett’s own work, Browning boldly declared, “I do, as I say, love these verses with all my heart—and I love you too” (Browning in Markus, p. Startled by the young man’s audacity, yet intrigued as well, Barrett continued to correspond with him by letter. They at last met face to face in May 1845, and, soon after, Browning initiated a clandestine courtship, clandestine because Elizabeth’s rather was a domestic tyrant who had forbidden any of his eleven children to marry. In 1846, the two poets were secretly married; a few days later, they eloped to Italy, for which Mr. Barrett never forgave his daughter. The Browning’s nevertheless lived happily in Florence tor the next 15 years, writing poetry, raising a son, Robert Weidemann Barrett Browning, and, in Elizabeth’s case, becoming involved in local politics. After her death in 1861, Browning and his son returned to England; he never remarried.
his last sight of his wife, “How beautiful she looks now—how perfectly beautiful!” (Browning in Markus, pp. 333, 334). Even Browning, however, could not remain stoic forever; some weeks later, he broke down in front of lts a Blab-den, a female friend, gasping in uncontrollable grief, “I want her, I want her” (Browning in Markus, p. 332). The prospect of being reunited with Elizabeth after death may indeed have been in his mind.
“Meeting at Night,” “Parting at Morning,” and “Prospice” fall within the category of lyric poetry, brief pieces which convey the mood or state of mind of a single speaker. “My Last Duchess,” however, is a dramatic monologue, a form that Browning helped make famous. The dramatic monologue as executed by Browning and others was characterized by a single character—clearly not the poet himself—who delivers his speech in a specific temporal and situational context while interacting with one or more silent auditors. Browning’s taste for the theatrical often led him to choose particularly dramatic situations for his characters: thus, the avaricious bishop in “The Bishop Orders his Tomb at St. Praxed’s Church” is on his deathbed, the rebellious monk in “Fra Lippo Lippi” has just been apprehended in the red-light district by the night watchman, and the duke of “My Last Duchess” is on the brink of remarrying. Fittingly, “My Last Duchess” marked what was to be a rewarding new direction in Browning’s poetry. Literary scholar William Clyde DeVane observed, “The poem far surpasses its source in subtlety and suggestiveness. In the character of the Duke, Browning makes his first brilliant study of the culture and morality of the Italian Renaissance . ‘My Last Duchess,’ though one of the earliest of Browning’s dramatic monologues, has always been considered one of his greatest” (DeVane, p. 109).
Reception
For much of Browning’s youth, critical and popular success as a poet eluded him. Many critics complained of his rough, unmusical style and eclectic choice of subject matter, which some tended to find either obscure or disturbing. In 1846, an anonymous reviewer of his eight-pamphlet series Bells and Pomegranates made the following pronouncement in The Eclectic Review:
Mr. Browning would be a poet of high order, if he could free himself from his affectations, and set before himself a great aim in poetry . . . besides muddiness of style, Mr. Browning has also much muddiness of matter to get rid of. There is a sensual trait about his writings which will bring him one day a bitterness that no amount of reputation will be found an antidote for. Let him purify his style and his spirit, and we shall hope to meet him again on a future day in a far higher and nobler position.
(Litzinger and Smalley, p. 113)
The Athenauem reviewer of Browning’s Dramatic Lyrics (1842)—in which “My Last Duchess” first appeared—expressed similar reservations about his style, declaring “that what Mr. Browning may, perhaps, consider as an evidence of his strength is a sign of weakness—what he may regard as a portion of his wealth, is a witness of its limitation. The inaptitude for giving intelligible expression to his meanings . is a defect, lessening the value, in any available sense of the meanings themselves” (Litzinger and Smalley, p. 84).
While these are harsh evaluations, the young Browning had his defenders as well. John Forster, writing for The Examiner, declared that “in the simple but manly strain of some of these Dramatic Lyrics, we find proof of the firmer march and steadier control. Mr. Browning will win his laurel” (Forster in Litzinger and Smalley, p. 82). Forster also singled out “My Last Duchess”—then titled “Italy”—and other monologues in the 1842 volume as “full of the quick turns of feeling, the local truth, and the picturesque force of expression, which the stage so much delights in” (Forster in Litzinger and Smalley, p. 83). After the publication of Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845)—which included “Meeting at Night” and “Parting at Morning”—an increasing number of reviewers found favorable things to say about Browning’s poetry. One critic, writing for The Examiner, noted,
His writing has always the stamp and freshness of originality. It is in no respective imitative or commonplace. Whatever the verse may be, the man is in it: the music of it echoing to his mood. When he succeeds, there have been few so successful in the melodious transitions of his rhythm. In all its most poetical and most musical varieties, he is a master; and to us it expresses, in a rare and exquisite degree, the delicacy and truth of his genius.
(Litzinger and Smalley, p. 104)
A reviewer for The Oxford and Cambridge Review and University Magazine concurred,
Mr. Browning has many faults which, were we disposed to be severe, might be mentioned with proper censure; but his beauties are exceedingly more numerous, and on these we are better pleased to enlarge.
(Litzinger and Smalley, p. 107)
After the publication of his epic, The Ring and the Book (1868-69), Browning acquired a large following, which lionized him for the very things he had been criticized for in his youth. Much of his earlier work was reevaluated in light of his new fame. “Meeting at Night” and “Parting at Morning” were praised by Athenaeum reviewer Walter Theodore Watts for their lyricism and for the way in which the “’still, sad music of humanity’ floats over all the passion” (Watts in Litzinger and Smalley, p. 447). And “My Last Duchess” came to be regarded as one of Browning’s best dramatic monologues. The Saturday Review described the poem as “a page long since placed near Mr. Tennyson’s “Ulysses” by the admirers of exquisite poetical characterization” (Litzinger and Smalley, p. 264), while Richard Henry Stoddard, writing for Appleton’s Journal, contended that “[Browning] excels Shakespeare, I think, in the art—if it be art—with which he makes his characters betray what they really are. They may deceive themselves, but they cannot deceive us. ‘My Last Duchess’ is a fine instance of this art” (Stoddard in Litzinger and Smalley, p. 372).
—Pamela S. Loy
For More Information
Browning, Robert. Robert Browning’s Poetry, ed. James F. Loucks. New York: Norton, 1980.
DeVane, William Clyde. A Browning Handbook. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1955.
Erickson, Lee. Robert Browning: His Poetry and His Audiences. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984.
Hair, Donald S. Robert Browning’s Language. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.
Hellerstein, Erna Olafson, Leslie Parker Hume, and Karen M. Offen. Victory Women: A Documentary Account of Women’s Lives in Nineteenth-Century England, France, and the United States. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1981.
Houghton, Walter E. The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957.
Litzinger, Boyd, and Donald Smalley, eds. Browning: The Critical Heritage. London: Rout ledge & Keg an Paul, 1970.
Markus, Julia. Dared and Done: The Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.
Mitchell, Sally. Daily Life in Victorian England. West-port: Greenwood Press, 1996.
Peterson, William S. ed. Browning Institute Studies. Vol. 8. New York: The Browning Institute, 1980.
Prescott, Orville. Princes of the Renaissance. New York: Random House, 1969.
Ryals, Clyde de L. The Life of Robert Browning: A Critical Biography. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1993.
Tucker, Herbert F., Jr. Browning’s Beginnings: The Art of Disclosure. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980.