My Last Duchess by Robert Browning

what is the symbolism of "my last duchess"? please give me some ideas, i have to write an essay of this!!thanks

Hi nona the brit,

You wrote:

Why, are you going to write it for him Mr. P?

First of all, how do you know that Parsa is a he?

Second of all, why does it seem like you think people are posting their assignments here in the forums so as to avoid working with the assignment themselves? In this case Parsa admitted that he or she is a high school student analysing the poem as part of his or her schoolwork, however, I suppose people could also ask questions like this merely for fun: what's more interesting than checking out what others think of a poem before revealing your own theories? In principle, a Professor of English literature who teaches English poetry for a living could post a question like this here just to see what sort of things lesser experts would come up with... And I bet that person wouldn't need to cheat!

hi i was reading your forum thread because i am doing a assignment on this poem. you give very good help. thank you. can you please help me figure out what the theme of the poem is? i thought it was "you don't really know what you have until it is not there anymore" but no i doubt that is it. perhaps it is : "people will never be satisfied with what they have, they'll always want more" (because her faults were things like courtesy, modesty, etc. which are not very bad. sorry for all the grammatical errors! i`m typing in a hurry!

U sound like my english teacher... i hope u arent

Hello TheLad, welcome to English Forums!

No, I'm not your English teacher, so you're ok.

The poem was first published in 1842 (not 1942), and he met EBB in 1844. So there's no connection.

There's a page on Wikipedia with the historical background to the poem. You can find it here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Last_Duchess

Good luck on Friday,

MrP