Robert Browning drew his inspiration from the suspicious death of the seventeen-year-old duchess of Ferrara within three years of her marriage. Through the poem “My Last Duchess,” the poet deeply explores the mind of such powerful dukes of the Victorian era and the dark aspects of life, especially for women living in those days. Women were objects to men and disposable to the desire of their husbands (Martens 215). The duke in the poem wants to control his wife’s aspects, including feelings. Edgar Allan Poe created the poem “The Raven” to exemplify people’s emotional battles during grief. The narrative is given in the first person to emphasize individual struggles experienced when battling loss and grief. “My Last Duchess” and “The Raven” are two different poems in the Victorian age’s voice, form, style, and features. Regarding the differences between the poems, “My Last Duchess” is better than “The Raven” in readability and the use of poetical devices.
The two poems take distinct forms to express the writers’ ideas or messages. Browning’s “My Last Duchess” is a dramatic monologue because a single person speaks the poem’s words. The duke talks about his last duchess while another person listens to him. The dramatic aspect emanates from the second person’s presence, who should be the recipient of the words that the readers hear. Poe’s “The Raven” takes the form of a ballad as the writer narrates a story about an evening following the loss of a loved one named Lenore. There are 18 stanzas in the poem, each carrying six lines. Poe utilizes the first-person narration to allow the reader to follow through the emotional progression of the speaker. Although these differences exist, “The Raven” is also dramatic since it uses trochaic octameter, which is considered a dramatic form of a meter. Therefore, “My Last Duchess” is a monologue, while “The Raven” is a narrative, but both poems are dramatic.
The voice and tone are different in Browning and Poe’s poems. “My Last Duchess” has a vulgar, cold, arrogant, and insensitive voice and tone. The duchess, through his words and actions, appears as controlling, brutal, and selfish. He wants his wife, the duchess, to exist only for him and hold his gifts in high esteem. For instance, he complains that his last duchess smiled pleasantly when he passed by but also gave similar smiles to everyone else (Browning 1). The voice of “The Raven” is despondent, dark, sorrowful, and melancholic. The speaker is grieving the loss of Lenore, his love, when a raven appears, and the only word it says to him is ‘nevermore’ (Poe 2). The poet’s choice of words creates the despondent atmosphere, including grim, bleak, ghastly, and haunted (Poe 1-2). Browning and Poe’s poems are distinctively different in their voices.
The structures of “My Last Duchess” and “The Raven” are also discrete. Browning employed rhyming couplets and iambic pentameter style and enjambment on the lines. The lines have five sets with unstressed and stressed beats following each other. For example, the last line of the poem is an iambic pentameter. In addition to the ballad, first-person narrative, and distinct trochaic octameter structure of “The Raven,” it contains a consistent ABCBBB rhyme pattern. Poe likewise uses many words that have a similar ending, such as nevermore, ore, and Lenore. He also repeats the same word at the end of several lines, a style called epistrophe. Therefore, Browning’s “My Last Duchess” and Poe’s “The Raven” have clear structural differences.
Browning and Poe’s poems share some literary devices, including alliteration and caesura. The former refers to the use of similar consonant sounds at the beginning of words, while the latter describes pauses within lines. Browning mostly employed dashes in his caesurae; examples include “A heart—how shall I say?— too soon made glad//In speech—which I have not—to make your will” (Browning 2). These pauses make the poem more conversational than poetic, making it more appealing to readers. Poe uses various punctuation styles to introduce pause, such as “While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping//Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow” (Poe 1). In these lines, the first uses commas while the second employs a dash and a semi-colon. These literary devices helped the poets to express their desired ideas to the readers.
The view of women and their position also changed from the Romantic to the Victorian age, as portrayed through the poems. The former era treated women conventionally, but the latter questioned their role in society. Such a change explains why Browning composed “My Last Duchess” to challenge husbands’ widespread objectification of women. The approach of portraying the duke as brutal, arrogant, and controlling allows society to have conversations around such a subject and create a way for change. Additionally, Browning’s poem is an example of how reality was infused into art and literature during the Victorian era (Armstrong 118). Although there were different values in the Romantic and Victorian ages, some of them continued into the later era.
“My Last Duchess” and “The Raven” were created during the Victorian era. Poetry in the Victorian and Romantic eras differs in several aspects. Nevertheless, poets in both periods used formal structures, rhymes, meters, and patterns. They also had male-dominated societies and used art to question religion while developing new ideas about it. Key differences appeared in the source of influence, language, concentration or focus, and themes. Some romantic values such as death and grief continued into the Victorian era. For instance, in “We Are Seven,” a romantic era poem, Wordsworth explores how children deal with grief better than adults do. Similarly, Poe’s “The Raven” shows how an adult is overcome by the loss of a loved one.
These two poems express a difference, showing that the Victorian era embraced reality more than the Romantic age. Poe questions the idea of reuniting with the dead in heaven when he questions the Raven (2). The response of ‘nevermore’ leads to despair as the narrator feels that such a reunion does not exist. In addition, Victorian poetry does not only center on the poet’s attitude but also includes another person, while Romantic poems focus on the author’s idea (Armstrong 227). For example, the raven in Poe’s poem helps the speaker understand his loss.
While it is difficult to choose between the two poems, “My Last Duchess” is better than “The Raven” in a few ways. Browning incorporates various literary devices to make the poem readable and conversational, giving readers better appeal than Poe’s “The Raven.” For instance, enjambment gives Browning’s poem a faster pace and a natural voice. In addition, “My Last Duchess” employs a simpler English language than Poe’s poem, allowing most ordinary readers to understand it.
Works Cited
Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2019.
Browning, Robert. My Last Duchess and Other Poems. Courier Corporation, 1993.
Martens, Britta. Browning, Victorian Poetics and the Romantic Legacy: Challenging the Personal Voice. Routledge, 2016.
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Raven: (1845). Trade Binders Local, 1998. Web.