Compare the three dramatic monologues you have studied and comment on the way in which the characters reveal their true nature through what they say.

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Compare the three dramatic monologues you have studied and comment on the way in which the characters reveal their true nature through what they say.

All three poems have something very similar in common, that is that all three of them are based around relationships and that each speaker reveals more than they intend too.  In each of the poems there is a main speaker.   In “Porphyria’s Lover” the speaker is a male, in “My Last Duchess” the speaker is a male and in “The Cleaner” the speaker is a female.  Each of the speakers talks about relationships in one way or another through the poem.  All the poems are set in a different period, “Porphyria’s Lover” was in the nineteenth century, “My Last Duchess” was in the fourteenth or fifteenth century and “The Cleaner” was in the twentieth century.

          The speaker in “Porphyria’s Lover” is male.  His character is conveyed by the words “sullen” and “vex”.  All these words show that the personality of the speaker is that he is quiet.  He does not seem to have very good manners because when Porphyria enters the house her lover just sits there and lets her get on with it by lighting the fire, and she has to go to him when it should havebeen him meeting her from the front he door and bringing her into an already warm house.  In “My Last Duchess” the speaker again is a male.  The speaker is the Duke; the poem is in his picture gallery of which he is very proud.  Compared to the man in “Porphyria’s Lover” the Duke has manners, “Will’t please you rise?”.  The Duke seems very arrogant, he appears to be well educated, have a good vocabulary and have a very good sentence structure.  In “The Cleaner” the speaker is a woman, she appears to have a nice personality and at the same time she seems to spy an awful lot, which does not make her a nice person.  You can tell that she has not been well educated because she uses colloquial speech in her sentences, she has a very simple vocabulary and her sentences are very short.  The setting in all the poem’s differ from each other.  In “Porphyria’s Lover” the setting is in a cottage in the country by a lake and s proberly very quiet.  In “My last Duchess” the setting is in the Duke’s picture gallery, which is in his Palace, this is defiantly not going to be a quiet place unlike in “Porphyria's Lover”.  In “Cleaner” the setting is in the Halls of Residence at the University which she works at.

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 Porphyria’s lover lives in a house alone in the country.  The opening lines to the poem shows that he is lonely and there is nothing much to do but just sit around.  This is shown by the way he talks about the weather “The rain set early in tonight” and “The sullen wind was soon awake”.  Then Porphyria enters, “When glided in Porphyria”, the word “glided” shows that she enters very silently, it is an open vowel word the “I” sound is stressed to make it softer.  The effect that Porphyria has on the house when she enters the house ...

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