My Last Duchess Figurative Language

Andrew Marvell and Robert Browning pose two very different poems, each with a unique viewpoint on how women were viewed by men in the seventeenth century. In “To His Coy Mistress” and “My Last Duchess”, the women are clearly secondary to the men; each of the speakers is controlling and dominant, reducing the women to the objects of their desires, and when the women do not match their fantasy, the implications are deadly.
Each poem uses drastically different amounts of figurative language. Present in “To His Coy Mistress” are many allusions to the afterlife and death. This makes the speaker’s tone more and more threatening through out the poem by using language that is usually tied to death; he states “ The grave is a private place (Line 31),”and he talks about the “wingéd chariot” (Line 22) nearby, which is a common allusion to a soul departing into the afterlife. There is very little figurative language in “My Last Duchess”; the most prominent is the personification of the blush along the woman’s throat …show more content…
The men in both of the poems are very controlling even though their personalities differ. In “My Last Duchess”, the speaker states “ I gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together.”(Line 45-46) The speaker had control over the woman’s life and her death. The speaker in “To His Coy Mistress” uses biblical allusions, which parallel him to God. He states he “Love[s] [her] ten years before the flood (the biblical flood where God destroyed mankind) (Line 8),” but she would refuse until the conversion of the Jews (which is a biblical event as well, though the event is not attributed to God, rather the Jews will convert by their own volition, and the non-believers will be killed)(Line 10). Both of these events exude violence, and the result of noncompliance is death. If the man fancies himself God, one can only imagine what will happen to the woman if she keeps

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