English Literature / Unit 14 ENL 1341 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Reading a Dramatic Monologue
The idea
A dramatic monologue asks you to read a character, not a poet, so use four steps. First, identify the speaker and the situation from the title and opening lines: in "My Last Duchess" the epigraph "Ferrara" and the portrait tell you a duke is showing a painting. Second, identify the silent listener, whose presence and responses appear only in the speaker's words; the duke's envoy is revealed when the Duke says, "Will't please you rise?" Third, find what the speaker reveals without meaning to: the duke's "I gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together" confesses more than he intends. Fourth, measure the gap between how the speaker sees himself and how the reader sees him, because that irony is the poem's point. Then state what the poem shows about the speaker's mind and how the form makes us see it.
In practice
Speaker, listener, unintended revelation, the gap.
Where people slip
Never treat the speaker's view as the poet's. Questions on Browning test whether you see through the speaker.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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