I believe that the Duke didnt feel any emotions for his former wife and as we can tell from the
way the Lover acts at the end of Porphyrias Lover, he clearly doesnt feel the emotion of guilt.
After strangling Porphyria, the poet says, 'No pain felt she'. Obviously she did but he says this because it's like a fight and he wants the reader to be on his side and not think bad of him. He wants to reassure the reader that it is normal to kill someone and it is normal that guilt isn't felt.
At this point, Porphyria is like a puppet, she cannot do anything and he controls her completely, 'I propped her head up as before.' He describes her eyelids as, 'as shut as a bud that holds a bee', a horrible image of the first time that he opens her eyes.
The last, shocking two lines of the poem, 'And all night long we have not stirred, And yet God
has not said a word!', proves that the man has a mental disability. He is saying he doesn't feel an
ounce of guilt and becasue God hasn't said anything, he believes his actions have been sanctioned
by God.
This poem was originally called, 'Madhouse cells 2'. This implies that the man might possibly now be in prison after strangling Porphyria.
Love can be many things. For example: unrequited with the opposite partner either knowing that
they love them or not realising. Love can be a good, healthy two-way relationship with few
problems (stereotypcal love found in childrens fairy tales) or it can have an outcome of unhappiness, including death that is suicidal or murder. The love in 'Porphyrias Lover' is much the same as the love in 'My Last Duchess. Both of the partners are killed by the men because they can't be trusted. 'My Last Duchess' is a narrative poem in which we here the story of the awful behaviour of the Duchess (in the Duke's opinion) who is now dead. The Duke is a rich man who owns a large mansion in which lies a collection of paintings. One of the paintings is of his former wife, the Duchess. In this poem, the Duchess cannot be trusted to behave in the way that the Duke wishes her to just like Porphyria cannot be relyed on by her lover to come back to the relationship.
'My Last Duchess' is a dramatic monologue and when poems are written in this form, it adds a sense of reality.This is because the poet comes to life and we begin to believe that the poem is happening for real. This poem is similiar to the work of a famous poet named 'Chaucer' because both Browning and Chaucer describe characters in their poems with lots of detail.
At the beginning of the poem, the image is created of the Duke showing us the picture of his duchess. He says, 'Thats my last Duchess painted on the wall'. This implies that he owned her. He also says, 'Strangers like you that pictured countenance', This means that any strangers who were unfamiliar with the Duchess and saw her in the painting would question why her face looked
like it did. Although this would never happen because the Duke would only let people look at the painting with his presence and it wouldn't have been likely for him to have been inviting people he didn't know to view the painting.
'And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst'. The Duke makes himself sound very superior
and above everyone else when he says this, 'how dare anyone talk to me', and here we begin to
see his egotism revealed.
The reason the duchess has this smug look upon her face is simply because she was a happy,
flirty woman; But it was not only her husband that she flirted with nor was he the only one
who made her happy, 'Sir, 'twas not Her Husband's presence only, called that spot of joy into the Duchess' cheek'.
Fra Pandolf was one of the men who the Duke thought it possible she might have had an affair
with. He believed there to have been many intimate moments between the two of them when she
was being painted by him and although he said or did nothing because he didnt want to think that it was real, he became suspicious.
Although he almost despised his wife, he also loathed her. She loved nature, the sunsets,
the fruit, the pleasure of living and it was this that the Duke wanted. Freedom. Freedom to be
impulsive and affectionate and become more like his wife, the Duchess. But with his chilling,
cold manner he would never achieve this and would be restricted of happiness.
'...she ranked my gift of a nine-hundred year old name'. The Duke is constantly referring to himself and the things that he owns. he is extremely self-centered and egotistic and although not a lovely kind-hearted person such as his wife, is still fascinating.
The Duke in a way is much like the lover in Porphyrias Lover because they are both possesive
but over different things. The Lover over Porphyria (shown in his thoughts but more his actions),
and the Duke over himself shown through his language, 'My Last Duchess...My favour at her breast...Cast in bronze for me...My gift of a nine-hundred year old name', these lines reveal his
arrogant egotism and self-centeredness. The Duke is also obsessed not with the Duchess but
with her behaviour, he believes that his duchess shouldn't ever look happy or reveal her feelings
of the world, 'The dropping of the daylight in the west',to anyone. Instead, she should act more like him and dislike people of a lower status than herself.
The Duke becomes so obssesed with the way that the Duchess behaves that in the end when he
believes it still isn't right, he kills her. Also the Lover becomes obsessed with Porphyria and the
moment that they share and also murders Porphyria.
Porphyria dies because her lover wants to freeze the moment and keep time still forever. The
Duchess dies because the Duke thinks that time is wasted. He thinks that too much time is taken
up from her beautiful, friendly comments to the world and time is also wasted from his
arguments with her about her behaviour. So time is wanted to be stopped and time is thought
to be wasted. When the two girls are alive though, the Duke wants to be obeyed by the Duchess but the lover knows he is being obeyed by Porphyria, yet they both still die. Surely it is enough for the Lover to be obeyed by Porphyria but because he is mentally ill, he kills her to freeze the
moment. The Duke on the other hand is not being obeyed and so although not a good enough
reason for death, is better than the Lover's reason for killing Porphyria. The Dukes fantasy is to
have a framed portrait of her on his wall that could listen and not speak than have his caring
wife, the real thing.
Neither the lover or the Duke are too upset about the death of their supposed loved ones.
The lover has a reason but the Duke is despised by the reader for being like this. He works
through women like food and discards them when they are finished.
From reading the two poems, we get a different view of the status of the two men. The
Lover is of low status and loves Porphyria and is very worried about her going to somone of
higher status such as the Duke who loves himself only.
From the poem, we have contracted information that tells us about the past lives of the poems.
These bits of information lead us to believe that the Duke didnt feel any emotions for his former wife and as we can tell from the way the Lover acts at the end of Porphyrias Lover, he clearly doesnt feel the emotion of guilt.
The Duke conjures up in his mind a conversation or even argument that would take place between him and his wife about her awful, un-snobbish behaviour towards life and how she disgusts him and has stepped over the line far too much, '...Or that in you disgusts me'.
The Duke then says to himself, dont be so stupid, I would never stoop that low for anyone, 'E'en then would be some stooping; and I chose never to stoop'. This line reveals yet more of his self-centered character.
The Duchess would flirt and smile for anyone, 'Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without
much the same smile?'
At this point in the poem, the Duke has quite clearly realised that he is definitely not the only
source of his wife's enjoyment, 'This grew; I gave commands; Then all smiles stopped together',
and simply has her killed. .
Even at the beginning of the poem, we knew that the Duchess had died but not how or when. Now
though, it is revealed that because the Duke became so obssesed with his own nature and how he though the Duchess should behave, we find he is the one who had her killed. Because the two were so unalike, they could not understand each other and he became fustrated that he couldn't control her.
If we had known the Duke and Duchess from when they first met, I believe that we would have known that their marriage would end unhappily. This is because, I do not feel that the Duke really felt any love for his wife and really only wanted her to look popular so that he could
continue being self-centered! If the Duke had have really known the Duchess and loved her, they most likely would not have married because the Duke would have noticed her normal, loving
manner then.
After the Duchess' death, the Duke jumps straight into marrying someone else, without really
mourning. He works with the Count and wants to marry the counts daughter. Of course the Count
would not have known that he married his former wife for popularity and ended up murdering her as well.
The Duke treats the marriage as a business deal, sayingthat money is no object, he just wants a woman. He proves that he is a good liar becasue he is crafty and careful enough to repeat that
his desireis only for her 'fair' person.
The poet has made the reader feel sorry for his new wife because of the fascination
of the duke's behaviour.
First Love is about the damaging physical effects that someone creates on the poet (John Clare) but nothing happens between the two of them.The poets heart will return no more because he has wasted all of his love on her. Like the Duke in 'My Last Duchess', in 'First Love',
although she doesn't know it, the girl that the poet is crazy about is obsessive over his heart and has made it impossible to return his heart to its own place. As personification, the physical effects are obsessive over the poet. He cannot escape from them and doesn't know how to rid of them.
The poem uses simple language but has an extremely overpowering emotional side.The language is also very dramatic. It is Romantic and pretty and in this poem, death has very little appearance because the man is head over heels in love. The language in 'First Love' compared to the other poems is very different. In Porphyria's Lover, it is very shocking and complicated at some points, 'From pride and vainer ties dissever'. My Last Duchess has very dramatic language but a different kind than 'First Love' and some of the points made by the Duke are chilling and send shivers down your spine. Ballad contains old-fashioned language, the main reason being because Ballads are passed down from generations and so would have been made a long time ago. Each of these poems contain even patterns and regularities which suggest the control of thoughts and feelings. Controlling words is a way of making sense of difficult things.
Clare, the poet of 'First Love', was very poor and in the 18th Century, unless you were rich, you didnt get educated. Therefore Clare had little access to books and had to learn from family.
Containing three stanzas, 'First Love' begins with the poet who sees a woman who he immediately falls in love with, it is not a gradual thing, it is like 'love at first sight'. The love is
'sudden' and 'sweet'. She has stolen his 'heart away', this suggests she has taken his heart and he had no control over it, he was like a puppet.
'Her face it bloomed like a sweet flower', he is a romantic person as he is comparing her to a flower, a sweet and traditional image. The physical effects on the poet are no where near
romantic, 'My face turned pale as deadly pale, My legs refused to walk away'. He is clay in her
hands to be shaped how she pleases.
The second stanza continues to describe the compelling feelings and physical effects of his
instant love for the woman. His world gets turned upside down, 'it seemed midnight at noonday'.
he was blinded by love, metaphorically, not literally blinded. He loses his power to speak and his
words seem in harmony with his heart. All of the things that happen to him are extreme but express the power that the woman has over the poet.
After stanza two, if it was a real-life date, in this day, the two would probably get together
but stanza three shows us the poet wondering whether his love is misplaced.
It begins with two questions, 'Are flowers the winters choice?' and 'Is loves bed always
snow?', these two are ritorical questions, there are no flowers in winter because nature has
suffered death, this relates to coldness in emotions, and if loves bed was snow then it would
be too cold!
The poet is then experiencing without articulating, 'She seemed to hear my silent voice', he
didn't say anything and he is just feeling emotions and not doing anything about them.
'I never saw so sweet a face', reflects stanza one and the repeat makes us imagine this
beautiful woman that he is in love with.
'My heart has left its dwelling-place and can return no more', the last two lines of the poem
cast a sad light. He has given his love to her and will always love her but he was too scared
to try and make her love him in return. Instead he stood there with no hope, letting love make
a fool of him. Whereas the two men in the first two poems ('Porphyria's Lover' and 'My Last
Duchess') dont feel any emotions towards their loved ones when they die, or even when they are alive, the emotions that the poet feels in First Love when his heart 'dies' are tremendous. He is truly in love although they have never spoken, he still knows in his heart before it is stolen that he is in love. He feels all kinds of emotions including sickness and doubt when he starts to realise
that maybe he doesn't love her. But it is too late, emotional damage is already done.
At the right points in both poems, Porphyria and the girl in 'Ballad' could be exactly the same
person. Neither of them pregnant, in a house with someone they love for the summer, because
in winter and when the young girl was pregnant the man didnt want to know her. In the end though, one dies without wanting to and the other one who doesnt die wants to.
'First Love' and 'Ballad' are both poems about unrequited love that end sadly, one more
serious than the other being with the ambivalent consideration of suicidal murder other then
the loss and no return of a heart. Like the men in the first two poems, the poet in 'First Love' has, I think, a misunderstanding about love. Although love must take its course and must never be controlled, that is only to a certain extent and the poet ignores this and lets love take over him completely, 'My legs refused to walk away'.
The misunderstanding in Ballad is 'Life' for the young girl. Although her social climate may
not be good and she may not even have a social life but she refuses to understand what love is and thinks that her world must end unless the unfaithful shepherd returns. She is not living her life to the full although hard to because of being a single mother, she should still try.
In 'First Love', love is an inequality whereas in 'Ballad', the storyline being about how a young
girl who has a baby wishes to become a suicidal murderer thanks to a smooth-talking shepherd who she fell in love with and who has deserted her, the love is shared evenly until the shepherd deserts her for unknown reasons.
Ballad is an anonymous, depressing, old-fashioned poem. It is formed of eleven verses with
roughly eight syllables to each line. On line 17, the poet has contracted the word 'never' into
'ne'er', which makes one syllable instead of two, therefore the continuous rhyming pattern
can be sustained. Unlike 'Ballad', 'First Love' consists of three stanzas. The first stanza has eight syllables per line but the second and third stanza have patterned syllables of 8, 6, 8, 6 to
alternate lines. Although not symmetrically even, it is similiar to the other poems.
'Ballad' includes techniques such as inverted word order, alliteration, imagery, repeatitions and
metaphors along with other things to make the poem a familiar, effective one.
The poem begins with the young girl telling us about the first time she lost her virginity, 'When my poor heart was strange to men, he came and smiled and took it then'. She uses euphanism to try and blame the shepherd for what has happened, 'He stole away my liberty'. It was not all his fault because they both lost virginity and should have been more careful and she lost her liberty and freedom from not thinking of the consequences.
She then explains how he loved her when she wasn't pregnant but when she became pregnant, he didn't want to have anything to do with her,'When my apron would hang low me he sought ...When it puckered up with shame and I sought him, he never came.'
I feel the young girl wants sympathy because she is consatntly hinting about death, 'O when
will green grass cover me?'. The poet has used imagery to make us feel sad although it is a beautiful image.
In the poem, the young girl is continually expressing her wish to turn back time but virginity is an irriversable process so she is wishing the impossible when she says, 'I wish I wish.'
'I've made its pillow on a thorn', referring to the baby, this is a horrible image to portray. She hasn't given the baby a chance to live because of her own problems which is in a way acceptable but shows she is a bit selfish.
She finally realises that the shepherd is deceptive and mean, 'His heart seemed soft but it was steel', a metaphor because no-one has a steel heart.
Again, the young girl proves her need to turn back the clock saying, 'O had I walked ere I did run', she wished she had learnt more and taken precautions before she had committed herself to do anything.
All through this poem the girl is seeking sympathy by using lines that are the truth but make the reader feel for the girl, 'He has two hearts and I have none'. She adds to the depressing atmosphere by saying that the man will be just as nasty to the baby when she is gone as he has been to her. This also implies that she is already considering suicide.
'I weep the past, I dread the gloom', this line sums up how the young girl is feeling, she cries about what has happened and she dreads the fact that her baby will face an upbringing without her and that she is going to have to commit suicide whether it be with or without her baby. The young girl has no will to live or to love and so does not care about her baby even though it is always smiling at her as babies have adoration for anyone. She feels that the baby doesn't like her though and is behaving badly on purpose. This makes her already hard decision, even worse to make.
The last stanza is a repeat of the fifth stanza (almost half way through), 'I wish, my child, thou'dst ne'er been born'. Because the stanza is repeated with minor changes, it emphasizes her unhappy wish to die and this time she is thinking of taking the baby with her, to become a suicidal murderer, although ambivalent.
Another interpretation of the girls feelings is that she could be seeking attention because she is so lonely and upset and she says that she will commit suicide to get someone to notice her. The most overpowering emotion that this young girl feels is stress and depression.
She cannot sort out her life and is thinking of suicide, which for such a young girl / single
mother is an awful thought.
My Favourite poem out of the four is 'Porphyrias Lover'. Some of the techniques included in 'Porphyrias Lover' are pathetic fallacy, endstopped lines, personification, metaphors and en jambement. I feel that the metaphors and personification bring life to the poem because they make the poem sound different instead of using tedious language and few clichès.
Pathetic fallacy really makes you believe that you are in one of the characters positions and
that you understand exactly how they feel. En jambement gives a sense of disorder. It becomes
too regular if only endstopped lines are used in the poem although it does control difficult
explanations.
The obvious difference between all the poems, is the structure and regular rhythm and rhyme
patterns. Porphyria's Lover is constructed using alternate rhyming lines with roughly eight
syllables to each line whereas My Last Duchess is written in rhyming couplets with ten
syllables to each line. As these patterns are even, they create a sense of balance and control
within the poem, especially if the lines are endstopped. If on the otherhand, there is en
jambement present, the poem is still effective and probably even more so because it adds a
bit of life and irregularity instead of the constant even beat.
BY Katie Messmer 10N
