Just spit out something on to paper and bs some stuff about a theme

Themes

Pride

The speaker's overbearing pride—or in moral terms, his hubris—is incorporated into the very situation of Browning's monologue. In it, the Duke addresses an inferior, the emissary of a nobleman ("the Count, your master") whose daughter he intends to make his second wife. There are financial negotiations at stake—the matter of a dowry that the Duke intends to collect from the Count. In fact, the Duke seems in the process of acquiring in the next Duchess an "object," to use his own word. But the actual amount of money is not the real issue. The Duke suggests that among noblemen, whose behaviors are governed by "just pretense," no reasonable monetary request would be denied; the negotiations, then, are in one sense a mere formality. In a second sense, however, money functions symbolically, both in the Duke's mind and for the reader trying to understand the Duke's motives. In his world, after all, people can be bought and sold, and the terms of their existence can determined by those like the Duke who possess all the power in a hierarchical society. Thus, the negotiations are really about the conditions under which the Count's daughter will become the Duke's wife—conditions that amount to, the Duke suggests, absolute submission to his pride.

To stress this point, the Duke describes the fate of his former wife, his "last duchess." It is here that we see the juxtaposition of the Duke's corrupt pride and the Duchess' pureness. Though he describes her affronts to his arrogant nature, she comes across as a warm and lively woman, one loved by everybody for her ability to enjoy life. Yet her pleasant demeanor evoked jealousy in the Duke: she was "too soon made glad, / too easily impressed: she liked whate'er / she looked on, and her looks went everywhere." He found it insulting that she equated his "gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name" with "anybody's gift." Clinging to his pride, however, he considered it a form of "trifling" to display his resentment or to discuss his feelings with the Duchess—it would have amounted to "stooping," and the Duke "chose never to stoop." Instead, he "gave commands," and the Duchess' "looks stopped altogether." Thus, the Duke felt it was better to dispense with the Duchess altogether than to live with a woman whose devotion was not—he believed—focused entirely upon him.

Art and Experience
The Duke's monologue both begins and concludes with the Duke drawing his listener's attention to works of art: first, the painting of the "last Duchess," his former wife; in the final lines, a sculpture of the sea-god Neptune taming a "seahorse." Because of this, the entire monologue—ostensibly about the failings of the late Duchess—is actually couched in the aesthetic terms the Duke applies to human relationships. But precisely what are those terms? On one level, they seem wrapped in the same corrupt arrogance that led to the demise of his first wife. As he exhibits the painting and sculpture, it is clear he wants the listener to admire not so much the works themselves as him. If they are beautiful, such beauty exists as proof of the Duke's excellent taste and his connections with the best artists of his day. His aesthetic sense, then, is equal to his ambition: he is obsessed with the ownership and control of beauty itself. This is evident in the way he describes the shortcomings of the former Duchess, who was beautiful but refused to be "owned" in such a way, and in his commentary on the Neptune sculpture, which he admires less for its intrinsic value than for the fact it is "thought a rarity" and has been cast by a famous artist "for me."

On a second level, it becomes clear the Duke's refined taste as a collector bears no relation to the humanistic qualities of the art itself. In the sculpture, he misses the irony we perceive: that Neptune, "taming" a creature of natural beauty and freedom, is in fact symbolic of the Duke himself. He also fails to understand that his appreciation for the skill with which the Duchess has been rendered on canvas is incongruous with his lack of appreciation for the painting's real-life subject. In this way, he has not only assigned art a higher place than life—he has also credited to art the qualities it draws from life. Thus, he is able to replace a living wife with a portrait of one: "That's my last Duchess painted on the wall," he says, "looking as if she were alive." While he reproaches the woman herself, he deems the painting "a wonder"—a form of perfection that, in his opinion at least, life itself cannot approach. "My Last Duchess" is written in rhymed iambic pentameter, which maintains an even beat throughout the poem.

Iambic pentameter has been said to be the most natural cadence of the English language. It consists of an iamb, which is two syllables: an unstressed followed by a stressed. An example of an iamb might be the words "a heart," drawn from the lines: "A heart—how shall I say? too soon made glad." The rhythm of the first two words can be scanned with emphasis indicating a stressed syllable, and an unstressed syllable:

a heart.

Pentameter means that there are five groups of iambs in a line of poetry; each group is called a foot.

"My Last Duchess" also uses rhymed couplets, meaning that every two lines end with a rhyme. For example, the first two lines of the poem end with the words "wall" and "call." The poetic device of the rhymed couplet, however, is balanced by the use of enjambment, which creates the more natural cadence of a conversation. This technique also helps to keep the even rhythm of iambic pentameter from sounding too monotonous. The poem interrupts itself—much as the speaker of the poem interrupts himself—by inserting a question here ("how shall I say?") or a parenthetical comment there "(since none puts by / The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)". This device also helps to illustrate how the Duke's true motivations are breaking through the surface of his everyday language.

too long, not gonna read that.

Why the hell would you? You're not the one with an assignment here

Thanks rhk

LOL, sorry Aven, but this is offtopic, it's impossible to stay on topic here ! Anyway, I can't really help with writing poems so good luck !