Robert BRowning

LIFE

• Was born on May 7, 1812
• Born in Camberwell(a suburb of London)
• Most of the poet's education came at home. He was an extremely bright child and a voracious reader (he read through all fifty volumes of the Biographie Universelle ) and learned Latin, Greek, French and Italian by the time he was fourteen.

LIFE

• The poet's grandfather had sent his son to oversee a West Indies sugar plantation, but Robert had found the institution of slavery so abhorrent that he gave up his prospects and returned home, to become a clerk in the Bank of England, angering his father.

EARLY POETRY

• In the 1830s he met the actor William Macready and tried several times to write verse drama for the stage. At about the same time he began to discover that his real talents lay in taking a single character and allowing him to discover himself to us by revealing more of himself in his speeches than he suspects-the characteristics of the dramatic monologue.

EARLY POETRY

• The reviews of Paracelsus (1835) had been mostly encouraging, but the difficulty and obscurity of his long poem Sordello (1840) turned the critics against him, and for many years they continued to complain of obscurity even in his shorter, more accessible lyrics.

MARRIAGE

• In 1846 Browning married the older poet Elizabeth Barrett, who at the time was considerably better known than himself. So started one of history's most famous literary marriages. They went to live in Italy, a country he called 'my university', and which features frequently in his work

POETRY

• By the time of her death in 1861, he had published the crucial collection Men and Women. The collection Dramatis Personae and the book-length epic poem The Ring and the Book followed, and made him a leading British poet. He continued to write prolifically, but today it is largely the poetry he had written in this middle period on which his reputation rests.

"MEETING AT NIGHT"

• While Browning was careful never to identify himself with the speaker of "Meeting at Night," many scholars and critics have interpreted the poem as a thinly-veiled description of, or reference to, Barrett and Browning's courtship. The two had to keep their romance a secret, and "Meeting at Night" captures much of the intense passion associated not only with a love affair, but with a dangerous and clandestine one.

LITERARY TECHNIQUES

• In the poem, the night, and the sea are used as symbols of secrets and peace respectively.
• Uses Iambic Tetrameter
• Robert Browning, however, is no ordinary poet, and there is not a single line in the poem of "pure" iambic tetrameter; every line contains at least one substitution
• And quench | its speed | i' the slush-|y sand.
• Rhyme Scheme is 'ABCCBA'

"MEETING AT NIGHT"

• The speaker is at sea at night, heading towards the black land in the distance. He briefly paints a picturesque image of night at sea but moves forward until he pulls his vessel up on to the sand. He walks a mile along the beach and then across three fields until he approaches his goal, a farm. He taps at the window, sees the lighting of a match, and then is overwhelmed by the beating of his and his lover's hearts as they reunite.

"MY LAST DUCHESS"

• Robert Browning published "My Last Duchess" in 1842 in a book of poems titled Dramatic Lyrics. As the title suggests, in these poems Browning experiments with form, combining some aspects of stage plays and some aspects of Romantic verse to create a new type of poetry for his own Victorian age.
• Dramatic monologue is a type of poetry written in the form of a speech of an individual character.

"MY LAST DUCHESS"

• "My Last Duchess" is narrated by the duke of Ferrara to an envoy (representative) of another nobleman, whose daughter the duke is soon to marry. These details are revealed throughout the poem, but understanding them from the opening helps to illustrate the irony that Browning employs.

LITERARY TECHNIQUES

• Browning himself described this poem as a "dramatic lyric" – at least, Dramatic Lyrics was the title he gave to the book of poems in which "My Last Duchess" first appeared. The "dramatic" part of the poem is obvious: it has fictional characters who act out a scene.
• Uses Iambic Pentameter
• Rhyme Scheme uses Heroic Couplets

LiTERARY TECHNIQUES

• The "lyric" part is less clear. "My Last Duchess" doesn’t read like a typical lyric poem. Its rhymed iambic pentameter lines, like its dramatic setup, remind us of Shakespeare’s plays and other Elizabethan drama. But it is about the inner thoughts of an individual speaker, instead of a dialogue between more than one person. That makes it more like the Romantic lyrics that came before it in the early part of the nineteenth century

WORKS CITED

• Shmoop Editorial Team. "My Last Duchess." Shmoop.com. Shmoop University, Inc., 11 Nov. 2008. Web. 02 Feb. 2016.
• Shmoop Editorial Team. "Meeting at Night." Shmoop.com. Shmoop University, Inc., 11 Nov. 2008. Web. 02 Feb. 2016.
• Everett, Glenn. "Robert Browning - Biography." Robert Browning - Biography. N.p., 07 May 2008. Web. 02 Feb. 2016.