Robert Browning Research Paper

There are a number of different techniques used in poetry to portray or highlight a message within a poets writing. Poets use poetry to explore a range of different themes and to express their individual opinions or views on a topic. However there is one idea that is commonly mentioned through a number of different poems over thousands of years. This is the idea of love and how at times it can be so great yet also so difficult. Robert Browning is a poet that tends to use a number of different techniques in his poems to explore the theme of love. He expresses this theme through his poems My Last Dutches, Porphyria’s Lover and Two in the Campagna. He uses techniques such as allusion, euphony, hyperbole and personification to highlight and identify
The technique is frequently used throughout poems as it assists the reader to form an image through association and be able to put what the poet is saying into perspective. Browning uses this technique well in his poem My Last Dutchess to show how love is not always enough and that is normally a hidden agenda. It also shows how love in some cases can be in other forms rather than beauty. Throughout the poem Browning portrays the man as having felt some love for his deceased wife; however, through the last three lines of his poem, “Notice Neptune though, Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity, Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!”, he uses allusion to refer to himself (the protagonist) as Neptune and his new wife as the seahorse. This shows that he was never truly in love with the woman nor will be in love with his new wife, he only wanted power over them. This demonstrates how the love of power in this case was more important than the love he could have for an individual. Browning does this to express and highlight the thought that love can be flawed and is often used to