AQA Power and Conflict: Understanding 'Exposure'

This poem describes, brutally and in detail, the suffering experienced by soldiers on the western front in WW1. Although a great deal of imagery relates to the bitter weather that the men experienced, the 'exposure' of the title is not merely the exposure to cold that the soldiers suffer, but an exposure of the mind--the poem describes how the endless waiting and watching breaks down men mentally as well as physically, so that their life degenerates into a series of unanswered questions and bleak statements. 

The First World War has been called a war of ‘passive suffering’ and Owen certainly focuses here on the torments, not of battle, but of awaiting battle. The experience of waiting for action, confined in the trenches, was for many soldiers a profoundly unnerving experience, and one which created immense stress. In Pat Barker's Regeneration, a fictionalised version of real events during WW1 which features Wilfred Owen, this is described very well when a perceptive psychiatrist, Dr Rivers, reflects on the ways in which men are stressed and traumatised by the experience of this kind of passivity:

Mobilization. The Great Adventure. They’d been mobilised into holes in the ground so constricted they could hardly move. And the Great Adventure – the real life equivalent of all the adventure stories they’d devoured as boys – consisted of crouching in a dugout, waiting to be killed. The war that had promised so much in the way of ‘manly’ activity had actually delivered ‘feminine’ passivity, and on a scale that their mothers and sisters had scarcely known. No wonder they broke down. (Regeneration, Chapter 9, pp. 107-108)

Siegfried Sassoon

Dr Rivers was the psychiatrist who treated Owen, who himself suffered from neurasthenia, or 'shell-shock', and had been sent to Craiglockhart military hospital to recover from this. It was in this situation that he met Siegfried Sassoon, who was to be one of the strongest poetic influences on him (and vice-versa). Sassoon had been sent to Craiglockhart in response not to an illness, but to his defiant statement 'A Soldier's Declaration', in which he protested about the way in which the government were waging the war, and refused to return to active service as an act of protest. Sassoon (known as 'mad Jack' for his almost suicidal exploits of bravery) was a decorated hero who had been given the Military Cross and it was an acute embarrassment to the government to have him criticising the war. The declaration was read out in the House of Commons by a sympathetic MP, and so could not be quashed easily. As a result, rather than being court-martialled, he was declared unfit for duty, and suffering from 'shell shock', and sent to Craiglockhart to be 'cured'. Sassoon's radical views encouraged Owen to write directly about his experiences of war, and 'Exposure' was one of the poems that resulted from this new openness in Owen's work. It references the unusually cold winter of 1916/17, which had produced great misery for the men on the Western Front (for some detailed contemporary descriptions of the weather and its effects, see here).

John Keats

‘Exposure’ starts with a reference to one of Owen’s favourite poems: ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ by Keats: ‘My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains/ My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk’. Of course the heartache and the numbness of which Keats complains is that of a relaxed melancholia which may seem very different to Owen’s bitter description of the hardships of the trenches, but in many ways the poem can be seen as Owen’s response to ‘Ode to a Nightingale’; there are more similarities than may at first appear. Keats, like Owen, is contemplating death, but unlike Owen he is ‘half in love with easeful death’, believing that it is possible ‘to cease upon the midnight, with no pain’. Like 'Ode to a Nightingale', 'Exposure' is couched in the first person, but unusually, this is in the plural: 'Our brains ache, in the merciless East winds that knife us... / Wearied we keep awake' and this immediately draws in the reader to the poem, as though we are sharing directly in the experience described. The use of the plural also gives the sense that this is not a solitary soldier's complaint, but an ongoing feeling of misery common to many men. Owen here seems to become the representative voice of the ordinary soldier. Try replacing the plurals with the singular to see the strength of the difference: 'My brain aches, in the merciless east winds that knife me... / Wearied I keep awake'.


The bitter cold lures the soldiers into hypothermia. When people experience severe cold, they often fall into a dream-like confused mental state in which they believe that they are warm. Mountaineers on Everest have died in this state, throwing off all their clothes in what is called 'paradoxical undressing' as they believe that they are actually too hot. Owen's soldiers dream that they are actually in a different place, a summer day, where they are 'sun-dozed' listening to birds and 'litterered with blossoms'. The lyrical imagery is brutally stopped by the rhetorical question at the end of stanza five: 'Is it that we are dying?' 
In their state of hypothermia, the soldiers experience a brief, ecstatic vision of home. Not only are they experiencing the blossom, birdsong and grass of Rupert Brooke's 'English Heaven', they imagine themselves seeing their own homes, with their household fires banked at night while the 'innocent mice rejoice' in the quiet night (a striking contrast to the 'nervous' sentries of the first stanza). However, the 'ghosts' of the soldiers cannot get home; perhaps because they are ghosts, 'on us the doors are closed'. The houses are sealed against night-time intrusion and the lonely soldiers cannot enter. Bleakly, Owen announces 'we turn back to our dying'. However, if his soldiers ‘turn back to our dying’ it is not because, like Keats, they are 'half in love' with death, but because they believe that only through sacrifice can life be preserved.  




The poem is written in a form which seems to enact the long waiting which it describes. The metre is irregular, with a a loose five-line stanza half-rhymed ABBA and then concluded by a shorter fifth line which does not rhyme, though there is some echoing and repetition of this line throughout the poem. For four stanzas, including the first and the last, this final line is ‘But nothing happens’. Two stanzas conclude with questions: ‘What are we doing here?’ and ‘Is it that we are dying?’, and two repeat the idea of dying with ‘we turn back to our dying’ and ‘For love of God seems dying’. The  form of the poem is unusual, and the length of the lines seems excessive to those used to the most common metres of English poetry. Generally, the longest line you will have come across in poetry is iambic pentameter, consisting of five stresses and ten syllables in each line (the longer alexandrine, with six and twelve, is relatively rare). Owen's line here outdoes both pentameter and alexandrine. The longer lines range from twelve to fifteen syllables, but the first stanza establishes a general pattern of three long lines of thirteen syllables and irregular stresses, followed by a short, five-syllable line. At times the final line is longer or shorter by a syllable or two, but the pattern set in the first stanza is generally kept to. The effect of this form is very striking. The lack of a firm metrical foot accentuates the sense of dissolution spoken of in the poem itself, and suggests vagueness, confusion, uncertainty and a sense of unending stasis. The extra syllables in the lines are often due to extra description, for instance, the winds are not simply 'merciless' they are 'merciless iced east winds', and this layering of description also accentuates the sense of endurance through misery.


The semantic field of the poem is interesting. There are a large number of words which relate to mental distress or exhaustion: 'brains ache... wearies... awake... confuse... worried... nervous... twitching' and these are reinforced by the nature of the activity attributed to the soldiers. The verbs in each stanza describe what they are doing in passive, neutral terms which emphasise their lack of aggression: 'we keep awake...we hear...we only know...we watch them...we cringe...' and these are contrasted with and  juxtaposed with active verbs as Owen describes the effects of the winter on the soldiers in the trenches in a series of vivid personfications: winds ‘knife us’, the ‘mad gusts tugging on the wire’; dawn ‘attacks once more in ranks on shivering ranks of grey’, the snowflakes ‘come feeling for our faces’; the frost ‘will fasten on…us, shrivelling…puckering’. The overall effect is to make the weather seem more alive and active and certain than the men who experience it.


The poem presents a series of sharp contrasts, starting with the initial contrast between the passive soldiers and the active winds, and reinforced with the almost-paradoxical 'we keep awake because the night is silent'. Here, the expected normality of ordinary life (where it is noise that keeps you awake not silence) is replaced by the reality of war, which is that silence offers a potential threat--as the penultimate line of the first stanza explains: 'worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous'. Similarly, dawn, traditionally a symbol of hope, becomes only a time of 'poignant misery', with a 'melancholy army' of clouds to attack the soldiers with cold. The frequent use of ellipsis (...) at the end of lines implies that the statements are incomplete, and that there is more to be said. It is an unusual form of punctuation, and implies that the speaker's voice is falling away through weakness or weariness. It contrasts with the certainty of the shorter final line in each stanza, the bleak 'but nothing happens' repeated most often shutting off all possibility of change or resolution. 

Owen’s response to Keats develops into a description of a numbness that is nothing to do with sedation and all to do with cold. Even the bullets in stanza five, although they touch the silence are seen as 'less deadly than the air that shudders black with snow'. The personification of the weather is striking: not only are the clouds an 'army' (the 'shivering ranks of grey', unusually, not the soldiers, but the snow that attacks them) but the 'fingering stealth' of the snowflakes suggests they are impossible to avoid. Unlike Keats, whose contemplation of nature in the form of the nightingale leads him back towards life again, Owen sees nature as a personified malicious force which ‘attacks’ in a way that the formal enemy almost never does. The single mention of bullets describes them as though they were birds, in ‘sudden successive flights’, and also as ‘less deadly than the air’. In the poem, no-one dies through being shot; they die of cold.


Stanzas six and seven of the poem draws upon the popular song 'Keep the Home Fires Burning' with its refrain 'keep the home fires burning / While your hearts are yearning / Though your lads are far away they dream of home'. The song was written early in the war, and Owen would have known it, and known the potency of the image. The dream here has been made real, as the men yearn to come home, and cannot, because they have their own role in keeping those fires burning. They draw away and 'turn back to our dying. / Since we believe not otherwise can kind fires burn'. The passionate statement that follows is reminiscent of the contrast in 'Futility' between the 'kind old sun' of home and the reality of the bitter weather on the front line (for an analysis of 'Futility' see my previous blog). The 'invincible spring' of God inspires the soldiers, but 'love of God seems dying'. This phrase can be taken two ways: either 1) love of God is falling away, people are losing their faith or 2) love of God is going to have to be expressed through dying for others. The delicate tension between the two meanings seems deliberate; as in 'Futility' Owen is suggesting that the situation of the Western Front is going to bring no easy answers.   


Following the courageous assertion that the men are 'not loath' to face the weather and the suffering, knowing that by doing so that they are protecting their loved ones, Owen's final stanza is a bleak and almost surprising reprise of the situation at the start of the poem. Despite the vision of home, the brief respite that it has given, symbolised by the change of form and the shift in the refrain, there has been no real change. Even the burying-party's recognition of those who die of cold suggests that they have been made cold at heart: 'all their eyes are ice' works as a description both of the dead, frozen, and those who look at them, seeing them only as 'half-known'. The final, bleak 'But nothing happens' makes the poem seem almost circular. After the activity of the bullets, the dream of home, the return, the soldiers are still condemned to the kind of waiting that will turn them into frozen corpses, trapped in the kind of passivity that seems unending. Paradoxically, the only action that they will be offered is that of war; the suggestion here is that even that would be preferable to the kinds of reflection that exposure to the weather brings. 

AQA Power and Conflict: Understanding 'The Charge of the Light Brigade'

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

I've written on 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' before in my 'poem a day' blog a few years ago here so some of this will repeat comments there; nonetheless, I've had some further thoughts which I hope will be useful. It's not a poem that you can easily 'use up' in terms of insights. 

The battle to which 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' refers took place during the Crimean War (1853-1856), in what is now the Ukraine, near the town of Balaclava (and yes, that is where the name comes from--very practical headgear for this cold Russian winters!). The poem reputedly originated format he moment when Tennyson read an account of the battle in The Times newspaper published on November 14th, 1854, written by William Russell Howard, the Times's war correspondent in the Crimea. Having an eyewitness account of a battle published in this way was something new for Victorian Britain, and it created an immediate impression. The story of the battle was presented unmediated by any 'official line', and the suggestion that a mistake had been made had far-reaching implications.

The article described in vivid terms the disastrous charge of a cavalry brigade down a narrow valley towards a set of Russian guns, and comments favourably on the courage of the men who made the charge in such circumstances. 'Brigade' at that time was an informal term, and does not reflect the size of a brigade in the modern army, which may consist of thousands of soldiers. As Tennyson says in his poem, over 600 men were involved (658 to be precise) and nearly 250 of them were killed or severely wounded, with many also captured. 475 horses also died. You can see a copy of the original newspaper and a a transcript of the article online.

Although the charge is famous because of the numbers of men injured and killed in an ultimately fruitless action, when you consider what they were actually doing, it seems more remarkable that any of them survived at all. The 'Light Brigade', as the name implies, was a group of relatively lightly armed cavalry. This meant that not only were they on small, nimble horses, but that they were not armoured in the way that a 'heavy brigade'  would be. Carrying lances and sabres, they were designed to advance and withdraw quickly, often attacking retreating troops  or heavy artillery moving position, where their speed and manoeuvrability was a great advantage. They were used to harass the enemy, for communications, and for light skirmishes, whereas the 'heavy' cavalry , with armoured horses and men, would be used for a cavalry charge. In this instance, the brigade, commanded by Lord Cardigan (another useful warm garment) were ordered to attack a team of retreating Russian gunners, and harass them as they were moving the heavy guns from position. Instead, they ended up charging directly at a team of active gunners, with predictable results.

The brigade galloped down a blind valley, with heavy artillery on the left and right of them, towards an emplacement of guns. Amazingly, they did actually manage to attack the gunners when they got there, but in realistic terms the action was a disaster. There are different accounts as to why it was such a disaster and who was ultimately responsible which discuss issues such as lack of communication, a mistake in indicating which valley to gallop down, a failure to realise the range of the guns, or simple mismanagement or hubris on the part of the generals (some modern views also suggest that it was actually a fairly effective action in military terms, and that it only became seen as a disaster because the public were so unfamiliar with the ways in which war works). Tennyson's poem transformed what was a national tragedy into a paean to patriotism. 

It was partly the reporting by William Howard Russell that made the charge sound as though it was a victory, or at least as though the men involved in it were noble rather than suicidal--many of the words and phrases that he uses are picked up by Tennyson, and used in the poem. Consider this passage from near the beginning of his article, for instance:

They swept proudly past, glittering in the morning sun in all the pride and splendour of war. We could scarcely believe the evidence of our senses! Surely that handful of men are not going to charge an army in position? Alas! it was but too true - their desperate valour knew no bounds.

The use of free indirect speech here (we can hear the peoples' thoughts, although the writer does not use the locution 'they said') may suggest perhaps the use of 'all the world wondered' at the start of the poem. The semantic field of the poem is also similar to the Times article, not just in simple terms but in terms of structure. Russell uses words such as 'heroic', 'noble', 'valour', 'spendour' and so on at the start of his acount, but also contrasts this with the language at the end of the article where we have 'wounded' 'sad', 'dead and dying' instead. This is something that we also see in the poem. 

The moment that the poem opens, the strong triple rhythm 'half a league, half a league' seems to imitate the beat of the hooves of a galloping horse. This metre (one strong beat, followed by two weaker beats) is called a dactylic rhythm--remember it, as I do, by imagining pterodactyls over the valley of death. The metre is not wholly dactylic--the line is missing a beat at the end, so that instead of being dactylic tetrameter, it has three dactyls followed by a trochee. The effect of this is to create a brief pause and then urge you on quickly to the next line. The four strong stresses in each line keep up a quick, relentless rhythm. The poem swiftly comes to the dramatic climax of the orders: '"Forward the Light Brigade! / Charge for the Guns" he said', with the person giving the orders remaining an anonymous 'he'. The simple brutality of the order is emphasised by the immediate repetition of the words 'the valley of death' and the unquestioning obedience of the soldiers.


The image of the Valley of Death in these lines is a powerfully spiritual one for Tennyson's original audience, coming as it does from one of the most famous psalms of the Christian Church, one still often sung at weddings and funerals.  The lyrics of psalm 23 'The Lord is my Shepherd' create an image where God protects the singer through all of life's calamities before finally bringing them to heaven at the end of their life. The verses appear in the King James Bible (the one Tennyson would have been familiar with) in this form:

1 The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.² He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
³ He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
⁴ Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
⁵ Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
⁶ Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

The psalm was generally interpreted as a prophetic forerunner of Christ as 'The Good Shepherd, who lays down his life for his sheep'. The mention of the Valley of Death, therefore, is also a promise that God was with the soldiers, even in these terrifying circumstances. As such it would have acted as a powerful reference. The initial repetition of the words creates a sense of unbearable anticipation as the subtle but comforting reassurance of the psalm is juxtaposed with a situation where people might doubt their faith in the terror of this genuine valley of death. Speaking of death, you might also like to notice the dead rhymes where a word is rhymed with itself (e.g. hundred/hundred), creating a relentless and deadening effect. 

In the second stanza, the controversial orders are repeated again, the use of direct speech here may suggest that the orders have had to be repeated--as though the soldiers were disbelieving of what they have been told to do. The use of the rhetorical question 'was there a man dismayed?' nonetheless indicates the impossibility of the soldiers being rebellious in the face of the orders. Tennyson deftly does not apportion blame, merely saying that 'someone had blundered', but makes it clear that the soldiers themselves realise that the orders are unreasonable. The following lines use anaphora and parison to emphasise the inevitability of the soldiers following the orders: 'theirs not to...theirs not to ...theirs but to' The shift from the expected 'not to' in the third line to 'but to' emphasises the conclusion to which the soldiers come--it is not their business to question the decisions of officers, only to obey them. The powerful use of the monosyllabic 'die' as the final rhyme emphasises how their obedience will be rewarded.


Parison is used again in stanza three to hammer home the overwhelming effect of the guns.  The choice of 'volleyed' is an interesting one, paralleling the gunfire with sport and also creating a hollow assonance that imitates cannon fire (it is interesting that the first sense of 'volley' as a noun is the military meaning, whereas it is the second sense of the verb). The short sharp clauses give a breathless feel to the poem at this point, while the peaceful image of the 'valley of death' of the psalms is changed into the terrifyingly anthropomorphic 'jaws of death' and 'mouth of hell', personifying destruction as an almost demonic force (one thinks of the mouth of hell in medieval mystery plays and church frescos). This personification, and idea of the mouth may have come from Russell's article, who writes of death literally embracing the soldiers and describes the cannons as 'mouths':  'A more fearful spectacle was never witnessed than by those who, without the power to aid, beheld their heroic countrymen rushing to the arms of death. At the distance of 1200 yards the whole line of the enemy belched forth, from thirty iron mouths, a flood of smoke and flame'. 

In stanza four we notice again echoes of Russell's article. The idea  of the sabres 'flashing in air', is drawn surely from 'Through the clouds of smoke we could see their sabres flashing as they rode up to the guns'. The sibilance in this stanza is striking, aligned to the stressed syllables, and moving to a climax at the lines 'sabre stroke / Shattered and sundered' which almost recreates the sound of the sabres swishing through the air. When you're thinking about the poem, try and concentrate on some of the amazing sound effects that Tennyson creates. He is very fond of alliteration and assonance, and this is something that you should notice.The repetitive nature of the next stanzas enact the journey of the soldiers back through the carnage, and powerfully restores their reputation with the words 'Back from the mouth of hell'. The shift in the repetition here, form the repeated 'six hundred' to 'left of six hundred' creates additional poignancy. The repetition in the poem throughout may remind you of a ballad--and it has something of this feel to it--and here we see the old ballad technique of incremental repetition used to devastating effect, where with the change of a single word or so drip-feeds us with information, until, for instance, we finally find that not all the 'six hundred' come back.

The video below gives you a sense of what the context of the charge was, has some interesting quotations from survivors of the battle, and also provides you with a recording of Tennyson reading the poem. 

AQA Power and Conflict: Understanding 'My Last Duchess'

This poem is one of Browning's most famous Dramatic Monologues, and typically revealing of its subject. Browning pioneered this kind of poem, which reflects his interest in human character, and in the nature of good and evil. A dramatic monologue is a poem which is in the first person, and is constructed as though it was a speech from a play. It is written in couplets of iambic pentameter, which reinforces this impression, though the subtlety of the rhyme at times makes it draw near to blank verse. It is not, however, like a soliloquy, where the speaker is speaking their private thoughts, it is a speech which is aimed at someone else--an unseen auditor. Understanding the nature of the auditor is key to reading a dramatic monologue effectively.

Alfonso II D'Este, Duke of Ferrara

In a soliloquy, the speaker may be explaining something to the audience, but he affects to be unaware of them, and acts as though he is alone. In  the soliloquy ‘is this a dagger which I see before me’ for instance, Macbeth seems to be thinking through his thoughts by himself. He is not thinking about the impression he might make on someone listening, and therefore there is no difference between what he actually conveys to the listener and what he intends to say. In ‘My Last Duchess’, on the other hand, the speaker is clearly both conscious of his auditor (the envoy) and also trying to send him a message, and make a particular impression. As readers, we see both the impression he intends to make, and infer other, more negative things about his character; the net result is that the speaker reveals himself inadvertently and 'says' more than he means. In short, the idea behind the dramatic monologue is that the speaker is putting forward their public, not their private self, but that nonetheless, we (as perceptive readers) can see past the mechanisms whereby that speaker tries to put across a certain impression of themselves, and understand something about the speaker that he or she did not intend to reveal. It is this difference between the intention of the poet and the intention of the speaker that creates the irony that is of key importance in the monologue.

It is important when reading a dramatic monologue to realise that the thoughts and feelings put forward, though they are in the first person, are not those of the poet. Browning is creating a character just as artfully as Fra Pandolf created a painting, and although the Duke is realistic in many respects, he remains a construct. Don't fall into the error, when writing about the poem, to ventriloquise the Duke's thoughts and feelings. Instead, focus on how Browning creates the impression of those thoughts and feelings. In this poem, the  epigraph 'Ferrara' gives us the clue about who is speaking. Browning put the monologue into the voice of the sixteenth century Duke of Ferrara, Alfonso D'Este, who was married three times. His first wife died two years after their marriage, and was at the time suspected to have been poisoned (later authorities think that she may have died of tuberculosis). Browning imagines the Duke speaking to an envoy who is about to negotiate his second marriage. The Duke decides to discuss his dead wife 'my last duchess' with the man who is responsible for carrying back a message to the father of his prospective new wife. The poem is therefore a message, a warning, and a valuable insight into the Duke's character. The irony comes in as the Duke clearly imagines that he is 'teaching a lesson' to the envoy about his expectations--as audience, on the other hand, we imagine the envoy's horror at what he learns about the Duke's behaviour. The Duke intends to give an impressive sense of his power and his aristocratic pride, but simply gives us a sense that he is an insecure and sadistic man.

The first line of the poem immediately throws us into the middle of a conversation—as though we had just stepped into a scene that was already underway. Although the auditor never speaks, the Duke's constant references to him give us a keen sense of his presence, as he is instructed to sit, look and stand. The Duke also comments on the auditor's facial expressions and interprets them for us, adding to the impression that he is a controlling and dominant person; we get a sense that either the envoy can literally not get a word in edgeways in the face of the Duke's narrative, or perhaps a sense that he is unable to respond through shock or fear of the Duke's reaction.

The contrast between the statement 'That's my last duchess' and 'looking as if she were alive' gives us an immediate frisson as we realise that the duke is coldly discussing his dead wife through the medium of her portrait. Immediately, the words ‘last duchess’ imply that something has happened to the woman—that the speaker has, or will have, a ‘next duchess’. The Duke is actually referring to a fresco—a painting made on wet plaster, highly regarded by aristocrats of the renaissance as a symbol of wealth—a symbol also of the taste and discernment that the time valued in its nobility. The phrase ‘looking as she were alive’ implies the duchess is dead—but that her portrait is realistic. In fact it is so realistic that she is also (punningly) 'looking' (i.e. regarding the speaker) 'as if she were alive', and the Duke explicitly mentions  the 'depth and passion' of her 'gaze' at the onlooker. It is telling that this active, 'lively' portrait is, most of the time, hidden behind a curtain, controlled in just the same way as the Duke tried to control the living woman.

There is a suggestion  throughout the Duke's speech that the portrait is an adequate replacement for the presence of the real woman it represents (speaking of the painting, he calls it 'she' and 'her'). This impression is reinforced by the idea that 'the piece'—the work of art—is 'a wonder'. This very clearly makes evident the Duke's priorities—he admires the art, but not the woman, he is fascinated by the process by which it was created (the painter, Fra Pandolf, painted rapidly on wet plaster to create the fresco within a day), but less interested in his wife's thoughts and feelings. There is little sense that he mourns her. The speed of the painting's creating, incidentally, is not only an accurate reflection of the process of creating a fresco, but also may reflect the idea of creation in the Bible, where the creation of humankind took only a day. The Duke is in the position of God, but has delegated the creation to 'Fra Pandolf's hands'.

Paranoia is rapidly suggested by the Duke's response to the envoy's implicit obedience to his command to sit and look at the picture. He imagines that the envoy must be asking himself why the Duchess looks so happy in her picture, and that he might think that she was enamoured of the artist. Hence he mentions 'by design' (another example of wordplay) that the painter was a monk, so as to explain that this was not the case. He interprets the envoy's glance at him as a criticism of his wife, implying that there is something wrong with her expression in the painting, and he imagines that everyone who looks at the painting feels the same way: 'not the first /Are you to turn and ask thus'. When he says 'ask thus' here he is referring not to a verbal interaction but to a 'look' which he interprets as a criticism of his wife. This immediately suggests that he is prone to making such judgements, and builds on the sense that the Duke is fascinated by 'looks' (in every sense of the word) and by the implications that lie behind speech. What is ironic here is that the audience of the poem can see that the Duke may, in fact, be reading these imagined looks and glances wrongly. He tries so hard to justify his own reading of the Duchess's behaviour that he paradoxically convinces the audience of her essential innocence. 

His rapid explanation of the 'spot of joy' (that is the blush on the Duchess's cheek) immediately gives us the impression that he is suspicious and controlling. His reference to 'a heart—how shall I say?—too soon made glad' implies that he is unhappy about his wife's pleasure, the positive connotations of 'glad' undermined by the negative 'too soon'. It becomes clear that the Duke is critical, not of imagined infidelity, but of what he sees as a lack of discrimination and pride: 'she liked whate'er she looked on /And her looks went everywhere'. The chime between 'what're' and 'everywhere' creates the effect of epanalepsis in these lines which enfolds the statement in a continuing circle of blame, reinforcing the confused sense that the Duke has of 'everyone' looking at the Duchess and judging her glances as flirtatious or unfitting. 

The Duke’s insistence that he is right in his behaviour and in his suspicions inevitably leads the reader to suspect his motives. His description of his wife’s delight in small things: ‘all and each /would draw from her alike the approving speech / or blush, at least’ suggests someone innocent and modest to the reader, and his list of her offences—thanking people, smiling at them—tempts us to believe that he has been unjust to her. The Duke’s difficulty in communicating her offence suggests how subtle it is, while his failure to communicate with her emphasises his harsh pride: ‘I choose / Never to stoop’.  The caesura here emphasises the ways in which the Duke 'breaks up' his speech, and the repeated use of such caesuras also breaks up the natural flow of the couplets so as to create speech which has less emphasis on the rhyme-words and so sounds more conversational (and more like blank verse). Throughout the poem, enjambement means that we read rapidly over the rhyme-words, so that they are not emphasised as strongly as they would be if they came at the end of a clause. This embeds the rhymes within speech which creates a more natural effect, whilst still demonstrating the poet's craft. It is tempting to think that there is an analogy between this artfulness of the poet and the way in which the Duke conceals his purposes and feelings through his manipulative speech.

In a dramatic monologue, the reader has to do a great deal of the work. You need to think constantly beyond the surface meaning so as to see what the writer wishes to imply. In 'My Last Duchess' even subtle details of punctuation give us ideas about performance and tone.
For instance, look at the way the short sentences imply tone in a section such as: ‘This grew. I gave commands. Then all smiles stopped together’. Parenthesis also adds clues about tone: ‘Even if you had skill in words—which I have not—to make your will quite clear…’ while direct address to the silent auditor also implies something about performance: ‘Sir, ‘twas all one!’ Even commas can be rich in implication: ‘the approving speech, or glance, at least…’

Lucrezia de'Medici, Duchess of Ferrara

Subtle details of expression give you an impression of character throughout. For instance the Duke repeatedly denies that he has ‘skill in words’ even while he speaks fluently and persuasively. His hesitancy 'how shall I say' seems to imply not uncertainty about what he want to to say but a delicacy in naming his Bride's offence which is subtly threatening. This might make us mistrust other things that he says. The Duke’s emphasis on his rank is made clear throughout, which suggests his pride in his ‘nine-hundred-year’s-old name’, and his final resolve 'I choose / Never to stoop' indicates how relentless his pride has become. 

The Duke comes across as a ruthless autocrat who is prepared to kill someone rather than try to talk to them: ‘this grew. I gave commands. Then all smiles stopped together’. The duchess's failure to instinctively read what he wants from her, and to intuit  his unexpressed feelings about her behaviour means that she has failed utterly in his eyes. The context suggests that he is trying to give the envoy a warning about how his master’s daughter should behave, weighing out the expected behaviour as he weighs out the dowry: ‘though his fair daughter’s self, as I avowed / At starting, is my object’. We share in the horror of the envoy as he realises what the Duke threatens, and wonder about his response. We have to supply this—Browning gives us no clues beyond what the Duke says.

The taming of a seahorse from the Trevi fountain in Rome. 

The final juxtaposition of 'There she stands /As if alive. Will't please you rise?' brings us back abruptly from the world of the duchess, so vividly recreated in words, to the initial situation. We get little sense of the envoy's reaction, though it may be implied that he seeks to stay and stare at the painting a little longer without the Duke watching him, as the Duke insists 'Nay, we'll go / Together down, sir.' The Duke finally changes the subject (or does he?) by mentioning another beautiful work of art 'thought a rarity' that has been especially created for him. It is a statue of Neptune taming a sea-horse, a mythical beast created out of the sea-foam, and the evocation of this image may also suggest the taming of the delicate duchess by the brutal masculinity of her husband. It is another veiled threat—or boast, perhaps—that what the Duke wants, the Duke gets, no matter how rare or unusual, and suggests that, like Neptune, the Duke has ultimate power over everything that he owns—including his duchess.