A Comparison Essay between “Annabel Lee” and “My Last Duchess”
Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee” and Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” are two poems written in the same historical period, the 1800s. “Annabel Lee” was the last of Edgar Allan Poe’s poems to be published and it appeared in October 9, 1849, in the New York Tribune, while “My Last Duchess” was published in 1842 in the collection Dramatic Lyrics (Johnson). Both poems have similar titles because they portrait the image of a woman: Annabel Lee and the Duchess. These two poems have a couple of similarities, but at the same, they are different. Through metaphors, repetitions, imagery, and personification, these two authors portrait the idea of women in two different ways: Poe’s Annabel Lee is everything he dreamed of, his lovely wife and companion, which the poet speaks highly of, while the duchess is portrayed as inferior to her husband, her feminine beauty being helpful just to the duke’s…show more content… In the opening of the poem Duke Ferrara is talking to a representative of his fiancée’s family. They both stand in front of a portrait of the Duke’s last wife and the Duke talks about the woman’s imperfections. While he describes this long list of unaccepted behaviour of his former wife, he makes it very clear that he will not tolerate something similar to that in his new wife. The lines “I gave commands;/ smiles stopped together” (p. 465) show the Duke brought about the death of the last Duchess (www.enotes.com). The poem shows the inability of the Duke to realize that it is more important to have a real relationship with a woman such as the Duchess than having a lot of representations of