Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Monday, August 19th, 2024.

Today's poem is by the great Robert Browning, and it's called My Last Duchess.

And this is what I would call a fictional eqphrasis, an imagined conversation about a work of art that may or may not actually exist, but based upon the life of real people.

The speaker in this poem is meant to be the Duke of Ferrara, Alfonso II, who married into the Medici family.

He married the daughter of Cosimo de Medici, Lucrezia, when she was just 14 years old.

And three years later, she died under what are apparently suspicious circumstances.

And then after a very perfunctory and very short period of mourning, Alfonso went on to begin arranging another marriage to another well-connected political figure, the Count of Tirol.

Browning then has taken all of these circumstances as inspiration to imagine that the Duke

did something untoward to his first bride and has tried to imagine why he might have done such a thing.

And so the Ferrara we meet here is a possessive, very testy character, who's thin-skinned, easily takes offense, easily invents occasions to take offense,

and has a, and as we gradually see, revealed more and more has a quick temper

and is the kind of fellow who can hold a grudge.

So by the time we get done with this account of the portrait hanging on the wall of his

deceased wife, his last duchess, we are full of our own questions and suspicions about the

Duke and about what exactly happened to his previous wife. This is Browning's version of a

pot-stirring Netflix documentary or true crime podcast. It's rich and juicy and leaves you

wondering what's in store for the next Duchess. Without further ado, here is Robert Brownings,

my last Duchess. That's my last Duchess painted on the wall, looking as if she were alive.

I call that piece of wonder now. Fraub Handolph's hands worked busily a day, and there she stands.

Will please you sit and look at her?

I said, Fra Pandolph, by design, for never read strangers like you that pictured countenance,

the depth and passion of its earnest glance, but to myself they turned, since none puts by

...