Compare the presentation of relationships in My Last Duchess, Porphyrias Lover and The Laboratory.

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English Coursework

Compare the presentation of relationships in
My Last Duchess, Porphyria’s Lover

and The Laboratory.

           In this essay I am going to write about how Robert Browning portrays love in the three poems “My Last Duchess, Porphyria’s Lover and The Laboratory”. All three of these poems are dramatic monologues. Dramatic monologues are a combination of the words dramatic and monologue. The "dramatic" says that it could be acted out, and is a form of drama, however the "monologue" defines it as a speech that one person makes, either to themselves or to another. A dramatic monologue is written to reveal both the situation at hand and the character him/herself. A dramatic monologue should include a fictional speaker/audience, symbolic setting, talismanic props, dramatic gestures, an emphasis on speakers’ subjectivity, a focus on dramatics, problematics of irony/non-irony and involved readers role playing. Robert Browning was born in 1812 in South London, Camberwell and in 1889 he died in Venice, Italy, He is buried in Westminster Abbey. Browning’s best works were about people from the past in a form of a dramatic monologue.
           Robert Browning usually wrote about the darker side of human nature. He showed us how love is not just full of happiness but also sadness and horror. Robert browning was a master of dramatic monologue and used them to show the darker side of human nature.

In all three poems love is expressed in three different ways. In the poem The Laboratory jealous love is shown because the women is getting someone to make poison to kill her husband/boyfriend. “Soon, at the King’s mere lozenge to give/and Pauline should have just thirty minutes to live!” This tells us that she wants her husband/boyfriend to die as soon as possible. She wants to get her own back on what he did to her in the past. In the poem Porphyria’s Lover possessive love is used. “In one long yellow strand I wound three times her little throat around/and strangled her”   This shows us that the love in this poem is possessive because Porphyria’s Lover is committing a murder which means that the lover could not get Porphyria so decided to murder her which meant no-one else would be able to have her. He has killed her in his own way which quite unusual. Not everybody would strangle someone to death by their own hair.  In the poem My Last Duchess obsessive love is shown, as the Duke is still admiring his wife who died 3 years ago, by looking at her picture which is painted on the wall. “That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall, /looking as if she were alive”. This tells us that even though the Dukes wife is not alive he still thinks of her even though she attracted many other men.

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The 3 three poems that I am analysing all have deaths occurring in them. Porphyria’s Lover is a poem were the victim has been strangled to death by her own hair. “In one long yellow string I wound/ Three times her little throat around/ and strangled her”. This gives us the emphasis that perhaps Porphriya’s lover was too obsessed with Porphyria so he decided to kill her with her own hair and not any other weapon.  In My Last Duchess the dukes’ wife’s murder has already happen in the past; but the poem does not tell is how the murder had taken place. ...

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