Explanation of My First Duchess

I've gotten a few comments and questions about my poem "My First Duchess" which was written as an assignment where we were to make a modern poem Victorian or visa-verca. Here is the explanation of that poem that accompanied it, so that you may get a better understanding of what I mean by it being a "modern" rewrite.


To see my the poem referred to here, go to:

ID: 1007787   (Rated: ASR) My First Duchess  Remake of Robert Browning's sonnet "My Last Duchess" written in modern form. by Crys-revising

Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” is a classic example of a Victorian dramatic monologue. Dramatic monologues are characterized by a number of things. First, the speaker is a person who is not the poet. The speaker is a character, not just one who sees all and reports on it. In this particular poem, the speaker is a duke who has lost his wife. This speaker has an audience eavesdropping on his or her thoughts, feelings and speeches. The speaker often inadvertently reveals to the reader something that he or she did not wish to reveal. This is illustrated in “My Last Duchess” when the reader gets a hint that the speaker has killed his wife. There are suggestions that his wife was cheating on him. One most obvious example of this is when the duke says that “. . . ‘twas not/ Her husband’s presence only, called that spot/ Of joy into the Duchess’ cheek” (13-15). This poem never comes out and says that the duke killed his wife because of this, but it does offer some lines that suggest that he was upset with his wife and that his wife’s death may not have been “natural.” For example, the most ominous lines in the entire poem are, “I gave commands,/ Then all smiles stopped together” (45-46). These lines, and many other lines throughout the poem, suggest something that the duke probably would not have wanted to admit.

While these lines suggest, they do not give any definite answers to what happened between the duke and his duchess. This open-endedness is also characteristic of the dramatic monologue. It allows the reader to come up with his or her own ideas as to what the speaker means when he says what he does. This also allows the readers to judge the characters how they see fit. Dramatic monologues are therefore a very interactive form. “My Last Duchess” can raise any number of questions, each of which are left up to the reader to answer. Was the duchess unfaithful? Did the duke kill the duchess? Does he still love her (she is pictured in a favorable light) or is he just obsessed with her?

For the rewrite, I decided to take this Victorian dramatic monologue and turn it into a Modern sonnet. I used a sonnet because it was a classic form used in both the Romantic and Victorian periods that many Modernists enjoyed playing with. I tried to alter the sonnet as much as possible without losing the fourteen line form of the sonnet. I kept the rhyme scheme of the original “My Last Duchess” (AABBCC, etc.) but I added some literary devices common to the modern period and tried to make the lines less cryptic in meaning.

I decided to use many of the literary devices I did because I found them fun and challenging. For example, the use of compound words gave me a description of the duchess as “lively-looking” instead of the original “Looking as if she were alive” (2). It also gave me the idea for “fool-cherries” instead of the original “The bough of cherries some officious fool/ Broke in the orchard for her” (27-28). These compound words give specificity to my version of the poem that is not present in the original dramatic monologue. “Lively-looking” also makes use of alliteration, a popular device among Modernists such as Hopkins. In addition, the final few lines use repetition with “Who’d blame a man” and give the poem a nice closing.

My main goal was to give more specificity and reality to this poem. The Modern period was characterized by gritty details and short, declarative lines. Using the form of a sonnet helped me to say what needed to be said in a mere fourteen lines. I had to be more specific with my language not only because I wanted to be straightforward with the reader about what happened, but also because I had less space to do it in. For this reason, I wanted to blatantly state that the duchess was unfaithful to the duke. The rhyme scheme and style of the poem, however, prevented me from saying “My wife cheated on me with another man.” I had to find a way to state this that would be more descriptive yet obvious. I came up with the idea of saying “She smiled/ A thanks, but he wanted more,/ So she threw her dress off onto that gentleman’s floor.” This image gives the reader a very clear picture of what happened, and this picture cannot be interpreted in too many different ways. When it came to writing whether or not the duke killed his wife, I decided to let those lines connect with less clear ones in order to keep some reader interaction. Instead of blatantly saying that the duke killed his wife, I had him talk about using poison as a punishment. The reader, therefore, can still make their own decisions, but they will be more influenced by the fact that the duchess was unfaithful to the duke.

I also decided to use a number of ideas from the “war poets” of the Modern period. I included a line about nature (“I think I shall recall/ How she loved the lapping waters over her dainty feet”) and a reference to religion (“Who’d blame a man for loving your daughter so/ With hero-arms, with Adam’s temptation-flow?”) as ways to represent what the war poets were experimenting with in the Modern period. These references help to ground the poem in a way that is not present in the original.

For all of the changes I made in my rewrite of “My Last Duchess” there were a few things that I decided to leave alone. One was the speaker and his audience. The speaker in both of these poems is the duke, not the poet. It just made more sense to keep the narration in first person. In the original, it seems as if the duke is talking straight to the reader up until the end of the poem, when we learn that the duke is interested in marrying another young woman and has been speaking the entire time to his bride-to-be’s father’s men. I kept this aspect in my poem as well, but because a sonnet is much shorter than the original fifty-six lines of “My Last Duchess,” this knowledge comes quicker than in the original.

I think that the rewrite of this poem works for the modern time period. I succeeded in keeping the key aspects intact (storyline, speaker, etc.) while still making it “new” and inventive. It may not be as lengthy or as complicated as the original poem, but it is adequate for modern readers with short attention spans who want scandals and lots of action.