![]() ![]() Alfred Prufrock”), and Robert Frost (“The Pauper Witch of Grafton”). Later poets who successfully used the form were Ezra Pound (“The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter”), T.S. The form parallels the novelistic experiments with point of view in which the reader is left to assess the intelligence and reliability of the narrator. In “My Last Duchess,” in showing off a painting of his late wife, an Italian aristocrat reveals his cruelty to her. The subject discussed is usually far less interesting than what is inadvertently revealed about the speaker himself. Many Old English poems are dramatic monologues-for instance, “The Wanderer” and “The Seafarer.” The form is also common in folk ballads, a tradition that Robert Burns imitated with broad satiric effect in “Holy Willie’s Prayer.” Browning’s contribution to the form is one of subtlety of characterization and complexity of the dramatic situation, which the reader gradually pieces together from the casual remarks or digressions of the speaker. Praxed’s Church,” “Fra Lippo Lippi,” and “Andrea del Sarto,” it is actually much older. Though the form is chiefly associated with Robert Browning, who raised it to a highly sophisticated level in such poems as “My Last Duchess,” “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St.
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