"My Last Duchess": Paragon and Paregon

The interaction of creativity with interpretation concerned Robert Browning throughout a career in which he made the dramatic monologue converge sound, silence and audition, as well as image and vision. Reading such a poem is like being drawn into it, having to side with its personae, while feeling extraneous or beside the point; more than sympathy or.judgment, these alternatives lead readers to self-reflection, to seeing themselves shifting between the center and the border of some artistic design. Nevertheless, as many readings of "My Last Duchess" show, "this most dramatically paragonal of all ekphrastic poems" (Heffernan 144) undermines such a simple scheme of moving or fixing readers. This dramatic monologue, arguably Browning's premier work, adds a pictorial, fourth dimension to the usual pattern of speaker and silent auditor in a momentous, reader-monitored situation. …