Your Lips sealed in my head, eyes blazing red with sporadic green spots— You left me with Them, mama. Their bodies smeared on mine like the devil’s sick gushing into velvet red lava. You wouldn’t help me, mama. Too busy with your down to earth tomatoes, and your neatly—two neatly—picked hands, Gorgeous. No, mama—Disgusting. Chopping away every slice of parsley as if ripping my hope with the pieces that fell like a thin whisper, a deep THUD. You left and shattered me into broken glass, Do you love me? You don’t…Yes I do…No, you don’t! You left me with Them to rot at the end of my own umbilical cord the moment you wandered out the door.
Then, with a deep rosary in your hand looking at me with red eyes like God’s devil wanting me to end you, You left me alone, mama, in the little corner of that stifling kitchen where your teapots were utterly aligned but your heart—a disaster. You left me with Them that day in mid- June, mama. As you walked out the door, I left the shining teapot hanging from the ceiling like your heart that hung from my unreachable life. I left the pots and pans, the grease on the floor, the slick edge of your conscience. I left the ghostly clatter that filled my mouth with woes and booze. I left Them all to you, mama, but you never came back.
Destroy the world in so many ways: Crack a bomb, break legs, explode some schooners, and then make your enemy devour the little pieces while scraping his tracheas’ inner membrane, bleeding in hatred, spitting mucus around the ground-- disarray, disarray. That’s one way you could have broken my life.
Instead, in a moment? Drinks with friends. High on Speed. A little corner-- his vomiting breath squeezing against your pelvis. Yes! Squeal for mercy, enjoy your god forsaken moment and wait a whole month with fear building under the flies in your stomach just to know…
There are no stains on the underwear.
Two months pass. Your belly starts growing the more you endure starvation-- No one can know. No body has to know.Rejection: family, friends, even the one who committed this crime.
Nine months of manipulative aches as you hold your spine loosely, while standing like a ninety year old woman with wobbling legs. The day you give birth, you assemble yourself, blaring at the top of your cellars. The walls engulfing you are as bare as your soul that delves in your unborn child-- a tomb decaying with anguish.
II.
Three days later, a royal elephant starts hiding in your child’s room. The toy for your infant fades in disguise and then, you hold your baby, weep in the night, snuggle under the trash bin, give a bitter, cold kiss on your child’s cheeks-- oblivion to abandonment. You leave it there, sprint a trail of tears. Each one pounds on the steps it cracked, and you never come back.
III.
Fifteen years later— he is grown up, hair shining like his father who produced him under Speed. Eyes blazing blue like his mother’s azure face that shot in the cellar. The Child agonized with hesitation, filled with panic and anxiety. Why did you harm Him?
I am wandering, escaping between the scorching lines on my face or under the crippled fake smile. I am a beautiful lie. You made me: organs attached to each other like an angel clinging to God. I wish you had pushed glass down my throat and told me you loathed me so much that my own face appalled you. Instead, you threw me away.
IV.
Wherever you are, your soul rots inside me—lost, defiant, naked. Your eyes blaze with tears, and your mouth, oh your mouth… I fake it, but every night, I scrape your mouth with my bloody knives as I glance at your pelvis sucking against his belly in your previous pleasure, in my bottomless, ceaseless dreams.
Think of a title- a name, a city, a place. Just a name, they say.
Your heads flips round and round as you try to gather the edges of your polished brain oozing like the grease stuck on the bottom of a frying pan- yellow mucus splitting the edges.
Come up with a name, come up with a name.
Your fingers trembling with torment as twenty- five pairs of eyes haunt you in your day like hollow spoons eating your guts. The sweat arousing from under your eyebrow falls to the floor with such simplicity that it enters the sides of the cement’s cracks and fills a giant space- a hollow galaxy only flowing with imaginations.
God damn it, one freakin’ name!
Now, your feet quiver like the swooshing wind that hits the window of your car when you leave it a little open under the storm. Bedlam fills your stomach- hot blazing summer in mid-December. Your eyes twitch every three milliseconds, your mind jolts as it breaks, and your mouth trembles with abhorrence- a melancholy bleeding and only visible to the veins of your body.
Uhhh…Uhhh... Jesus Christ just say anything!
He comes close, looks straight into your fuming eyes, tells you to bawl out loud, not be afraid.
You finally scream: I killed them, I killed them all when I was Flying in Japan.
“My Last Duchess:” Tenure Found in Victorian Literature
From 1837- 1901, Queen Victoria, the first British monarch to become a visual icon, reigned over England. Her image described the clear balance she managed in her life. Yet, she was awarded that balance due to the Industrial Revolution occurring during that time period. When Victoria was crowned, “there were five cities having more than a hundred thousand people, and London was growing by as much as twenty percent a decade” ( Wolfson and Manning 17). Additionally, there was a huge development of technology: photography and mass production of goods. Most of the goods sold had labels of the Queen on them so that her image can emanate prestige and power. The immense increase in technology created a Victorian culture that was a “turn, even an escape, from the tumultuous and confusing here-and-now” (Wolfson and Manning 8). Accordingly, the Victorian culture became characterized by a sense of positive energy. At any point in the nineteenth century, laborers produced new and fresh goods. They believed that they can render their previous lives obsolete and give rights to all laborers. Also, the Victorians vindicated a sense of control where they had to manage their entire surrounding based on the industry created. Thus, many poets graveled and delved with these Victorian ideals. As a result from the latter explanation, “My Last Duchess,” by Robert Browning, is composed of a genre and form directly relatable to the senses of energy and control present in the Victorian era of the nineteenth century.
“My Last Duchess” presents a Duke speaking, at first, of his Duchess as a shy, embarrassed, and modest person. He directly states this by describing how she blushes when she is given any kind gesture. The Duke, however, does not find her to be a “perfect” Duchess, rather she is filled with guilt and is “too easily impressed” (Browning 23). In the following lines, the Duke unconsciously presents his stand toward the Duchess: “The dropping of the daylight in the West/ The bough of cherries some officious fool/ Broke in the orchard for her…” (Browning 26-28). Here, the Duke is clearly stating how the Duchess is a flawed character who does not obey righteous orders; rather she is easily pleased by any man and accepts gifts like those of cherries. The Duke does not realize the gracious acts presented toward her, but only focuses on his opinion that she is adulterous. Thus, he is aggravated at her behavior because she does not rank him superior prioritizing social and political status. On the contrary, the Duchess ranks the Dukes “nine- hundred-years-old name/ With anybody’s gift” (Browning 33). For these reasons, he gets the Duchess killed, and her painting then hung on the wall to be admired and reminisced. How exactly is the genre of the piece a direct correlation with Victorian ideals? “My Last Duchess” is a dramatic monologue that involves dramatic irony and further leads readers to connect those ideas with the notions of positive energy. A dramatic monologue is a genre of poetry where the poet is not exactly the speaker, yet there are staged personalities. The speaker is in a specific, dramatic situation addressing the audience within the poem. In addition, the speaker reveals elements about himself while he is in the “speech” process. This aspect is engulfed with dramatic or tragic irony which is an acknowledgment to the “contradictions of experience” in the piece (Deutsch 74). At this point, the speaker reveals to the reader information unapparent to the speaker. Throughout the entire poem, the Duke, is a staged individual who is addressing a certain audience. Without knowing, he directly ranks hierarchy as superior to anything else. Because she does not believe rank is important, the Duchess is then killed. This is clearly addressed in the poem: ‘”Paint/ Must never hope to reproduce the faint/ Half-flush that dies along her throat:”’ (Browning 17-19). The “half- flush” on her throat is a direct symbolization to her murder consequently showing readers how, right at the start, the Duke gives information that seems to be hidden from him. The language in the poem starts becoming out of proportion because there is a discrepancy between what the speaker thinks he is saying and what the readers knows. Moreover, this specific form highlights the Dukes personality. In his piece “Ferrara and “My Last Duchess,”’ Louis S. Friedland attacks the Duke’s Last Duchess. Is the Duke talking about the Duchess he killed before or the final one he just did? Friedland explains that “the identification of the “last Duchess” depends, oddly enough, upon the recognition of the other lady in the story, the one who may become the Duke’s second wife” (679). One can conclude that Browning refers to the previous Duchess he had killed, meaning that there is another women or another “lady in the story.” The concept of “the other” is a thorough relationship with the Victorian idea of energy. Victorians believed in the notion of creating new things, expanding their surrounding, and constantly producing great numbers of mass production in order to improve their ways of life. The Duke’s attitude, revealed through the genre, associates to the idea of finding a Duchess who will fit his qualifications, but at the same time “removing” others who do not.
Not only does the poem’s ironic and dramatic genre reflect Victorian principles, but also the images and poetic forms shape the senses of control and ownership. Most of the time, the Duke describes the Duchess as an object or a materialistic form. This raises the question about the ideas of possession present in his psychoanalysis. At the end of the poem, a Greek mythical image is described raising some vital issues. The Duke addresses his audience to “Notice Neptune, though,/ Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,/ Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for [him]!” (Browning 55-57). In Greek mythology, Neptune is the God of the sea who rules and governs all the sea creatures. The Duchess is directly compared to the “sea-horse” who is delicate and fragile. Yet, “Neptune” or the Duke wants to have power over the Duchess so that no one can come close or touch her except him. This same controlling factor is present at the beginning of the poem where the Duke states that “none puts by/ The curtain I have drawn for you, but I” (Browning 9-10). Directly at the beginning, the Duke tells his readers that only he can touch the painting. He is the only one who has the power to control and possess it/her. Friedland addresses these psychological issues: The Duke is an egotist who is either unwilling to content himself with a normal degree of possession or, physically incapable of attaining it, and exacts the last measure of obedience to his will for exclusive ownership (675).
He wants to seize the Duchess as an object just like his other materialistic belongings: the painting or sculpture of “bronze.” In addition, the poem’s form and rhyme scheme suggest the same possessive notions. The rhyme scheme is in aabbaabb… form. It is illustrated as follows:
That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall, a Looking as if she were alive. I call a That piece a wonder, now: Fra Pandolf’s hands b Worked busily a day, and there she stands b
The entire poem follows this scheme and the aabb form creates a closed couplet where “two lines of verse, usually in the same metre and joined by rhyme to form a unit” (Deutsche 39). That “unit” creates a type of organization. Instead of being a free flowing verse, the speaker intends it to be a closed couplet rhyme that further emphasizes the concept of power. As a result of the Duke’s psychoanalysis conveyed through the poem’s form and images, the Victorian beliefs of ownership are finally illustrated.
This poem, “My Last Duchess,” delves into the ethics of Victorian culture that generate senses of control and energy. The poem reflects aesthetic representations that were present during the nineteenth century. Through dramatic genres and descriptive, organized forms, the speaker ultimately attacks himself becoming obsessed with the notion of consumption, manipulation, and possessiveness. Although the entire piece can be very well related to the Victorian principles and ideals, yet it also calls upon a different mindset. How do readers “consume” literature? How can scholars manipulate poetry and art to the way they please? Maybe, at one point, that is all readers tend to accomplish- rendering and decomposing a poem to its deepest core until someone embraces a eureka moment, a grand idea. This poem not only foreshadows previous elements of culture and life, but also questions readers to the way they consume, possess, control, and sometimes manipulate any given text just like the Duke did to his “Last Duchess.”
Works Cited
Browning, Robert. “My Last Duchess.” 100-Best-Loved Poems. Ed. Philip Smith. New York: Dover, 1995. 64-65. Print.
Deutsch, Babette. Poetry Handbook: A Dictionary of Terms. 4th ed. New York: HarperCollins,1974. Print.
Friedland, Louis S. ‘Ferrara and “My Last Duchess.”’ Studies in Philology 33.4 (1936): 656-684. JSTOR. Web. 3 Feb. 2010.
Wolfman, Susan and Peter Manning. “The Romantics and Their Contemporaries.” The Longman Anthology of British Literature. Ed. David Damrosch and Kevin J.H Dettmar. New York: Pearson, 2006. 3-59. Print.
TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.
If you have not seen other pathways, you do not know what road to choose. In "The Road Not Taken," Frost attacks these ideas and shares the notions of destiny and choice with his readers. Sometimes, a fork in our lives is the epitome and point where we have to grow up and make decisions for ourselves.
1-Couplet: Two lines of verse, usually in the same metre and joined by rhyme, that form a unit. There are closed and open ended couplets.
Example: Closed Couplet Instruct the planets in what orbs to run, Correct old Time, and regulate the Sun; Both these lines are end stopped and have a logical ending as they close.
Example: Open Couplet Look in, and see each blissful Deitie How he before the thunderous thron doth lie,... The second line is a run-on and needs the first line to make out its meaning.
2-Metaphor: Language that implies a relationship, of which similarity is a significant feature, between two things and so changes our apprehension of either or both.
Example: A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress,... Here the a man is a tenor and his soul is his vehicle. The body is also the tenor. Other metaphors can also be found.
3-Quatrain: A four line stanza.
Example: The hippopotamus's day Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts; God works in a mysterious way-- The Church can sleep and feed at once.
4-Sonnet: A poem of fourteen iambic pentameter lines, divided into octave and sestet , with a prescribed rhyme scheme, and concerned with a single thought or sentiment. There are two types of sonnets: Petrarchean and Shakespearean.
Petrarchean Sonnet Rhyme scheme: abba abba cdcdcd (or cdecde or cdedce) The first eight lines create the octave and the next six lines create the sestet. The octave introduces a problem and the sestet (the beginning known as the volta) introduces a type of change to somewhat solve the problem.
Shakespearean Sonnet Rhyme scheme: abab cdcd efef gg The first 12 lines are devised of three separate quatrains. The last two lines make a sestet. The three quatrains lead a problem and the final sestet brings in the climax.
5-Onomatopoeia: The coining or the use of words that imitate the sound of a thing. It also refers to sound symbolism which does not give a direct echo but is strongly suggestive of the thing presented.
Example: the hiss of a snake the buzz of a bee the THUD of a fallen bucket to the ground the SPLAT of water to the floor etc...
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