Compare the ways that authors present the speakers in their poems

Compare the ways that authors present the speakers in their poems.

My Last Duchess, by Robert Browning and Poem at Thirty-Nine, by Alice Walker. These are poems that revolve around grief and pride. In My Last Duchess the speaker is a very proud duke with years of honour and power to his family name but his duchess shows no respect to anything he has given her. In Poem at Thirty-Nine the speaker is a lady that didn’t show enough respect to her father when he was alive but when she lost him she grieved for him and felt proud for what he did for her.
Browning and Walker have both got speakers, which revolve around a sense of pride, but riches surround one and the other speaker is average economically. I will evaluate the way the speakers are presented in the poems.

Both the speakers are in first person to give the reader their point of view and what they are thinking of. In Poem at Thirty-Nine the speaker is a woman recollecting thoughts of her father and being sad because she misses him. The writer has written her in first person to express her feelings from her point of view. My Last Duchess’ speaker is a wealthy duke displaying a painting of his last duchess. The writer has used the first person approach once again for the duke to express his pride of his wealth, family and even sadness for killing his innocent duchess. They both use the first person speaker because it helps the reader see the poem’s plot from the speaker’s point of view.

Both of the writers have made their speakers very proud of things in their life, the duke in My Last Duchess is very proud of his 900 year old name he has given her and all his power and riches. But he is also very viscous in the poem and seems to not care about women as he treats them like objects in the time of patriarchal society “My Last Duchess” and “is my object”.
This shows that women were seen as objects and prizes at this time.

Poem at Thirty-Nine has a female speaker that even though her father is dead she is proud of him and what he did for her. He will also be proud of her “he would have grown to admire the women I’ve become”. Poem at Thirty-Nine is very much about grief; the speaker is recalling her father and some memories of him as a child, which is making her deeply sad. She soon loses this mood and becomes very proud of her father. The poems have a similar way of using pride as the mood. But only Poem at Thirty-Nine has a large aspect of grief.

The structures of the poems are very different and they use different techniques to create the poem. My Last Duchess has a very strict rhyme scheme using rhyming couplets and Poem at Thirty-Nine doesn’t use any rhyme scheme. My Last Duchess has an iambic pentameter structure which is carried out through the poem.. My Last Duchess uses a very regular and controlled structure through the poem and doesn’t vary or change. Poem at Thirty-Nine uses a completely different structure involving enjambment and no set metre. The lines differ in each stanza varying from two word lines to nearly full sentences, this used like a caesura they create a dramatic pause at the end of short lines. There structure is completely different in almost everyway. The speakers are presented by the structure. The duke uses vicious language that shows pride and sadness and the woman speaker shows grief and sadness in the way the structure is written.

Emotive language is a very important in these poems because the speaker has either lost someone or mourned or they are just sad and maybe lonely. In Poem at Thirty-Nine she doesn’t use much emotive language but the structure with the pauses gives it and emotive and sad effect. My Last Duchess uses a fair few emotive words to describe his grief and pride. Both of these poems use emotive language to describe the grief in them.

The writers have used similar uses of structure, language and emotions in their poems to display the speakers in their poems. They also had different writing techniques than each over to present their speaker but there weren’t many. Even though these poems were written at different times they both use the same emotions for their speaker and similar ways to present them with a few differences.