The Duke is a very proud man, being a Duke he is higher than working class, and his family goes back for generations ‘My gift of nine-hundred-years old name’ he thinks that the duchess should have been very proud to be marrying in to his family.
Porphyria’s Lover is a very possessive, love poems often express the wish that time would stand still, Porphyria’s lover is no exception to this, ‘one wish would be heard, and thus we sit together now’ he wants the moment of love to last forever. He is very jealous of Porphyria’s ‘contacts’. He wants her all to him self, the easiest way for him to get this is to kill her because then no one else can have her and she would have died being with him and no one else.
The Duchess appears to be a very happy person, which finds joy in the tiniest things. We gain the impression that she is a well bread woman, who takes pride in her appearance. The duke is very proud of her appearance he describes all her beauty as he talks. The duke believes she is easily pleased ‘too soon made glad’ and the pleasing her made not always be coming from him, this makes him very jealous.
The first we hear about Porphyria’s appearance is when she has just entered from being in the rain, the lover is describing every thing as it happened in great detail, about her hair and how it laid, etc. Porphyira worshiped her lover at that point and he wanted it to stay that way, he loved her too much for things to change, for her to find someone else to worship, he had to act at that time in order to keep her to him self.
These poems are very powerful in the way they are putting across the love from the Duke and Porphyria’s Lover, they are both very jealous even though they properly have no reason to be but they believe they do. Action must be taken to keep their lover’s from anyone else, so they believe that they can do this by killing them because they would then die loving the Duke and Porphyria’s lover. The Duke and Porphyria’s lover are very selfish in the way they acted they did not think about the rest of their lovers life, just how they could stop them before they found someone else.
The weather in Porphyria’s Lover reflects the way Porphyria’s lover feels this use of weather is pathetic fallacy ’rain set early in to-night, The sullen wind’, it is a very affective way of showing how a person is feeling.
In my last duchess the writer uses old English, ‘mantle’ meaning cloak, and ‘forsooth’ meaning truly, which effects how a person read the poem. He also uses a lot of personal pronouns ‘I’ ‘me’ and ‘my’, this give the reader the feeling that he is very selfish. Browning opens with the Duke's words to his servant. He explains why he has named the painter, and that the portrait is kept behind a curtain, which only he can draw back. Duke tries to imagine what the painter said that would cause the ‘joy into the duchesses cheek’. The duke does not object to the artist's showing such courtesy. But he thinks his wife should be more serious and not so easily impressed. The poem's ending recalls its beginning as the duke points out another treasure. A bronze sculpture of Neptune taming a sea horse. This is like the start of the poem. But it is also quite unlike it, Frà Pandolf's masterpiece is a portrait of a real person, to whom the duke was married, yet she is never named, only identified by her relation to the duke.
The poem is in one long stanza because mono means one, and a monologue is a long conversation. It is also so it is an outburst, because the speaker had not thought about his action just acted with out thinking, the poet wanted the reader to realise this.
