Table of Contents
Introduction
Two Victorian poets. Two poems. Two men talking — one to the open sea, one to a nervous marriage negotiator standing before a portrait. At first glance, Tennyson’s Ulysses and Browning’s My Last Duchess seem only loosely connected: a restless aging hero and a controlling Renaissance nobleman. Both are dramatic monologues, yes, but the similarities go much deeper than form.
Both speakers are powerful men at a crossroads. Both reveal themselves through the act of speaking rather than being described from outside. And both poems ask a question that remains uncomfortable: when a man refuses to be limited — by age, by a woman’s independence, by domestic expectation — is he heroic or dangerous?
This comparison of Ulysses and My Last Duchess goes beyond comparing rhyme schemes. It looks at what each speaker actually does with his voice, what each poet was really saying about power in Victorian England, and why these two poems together say more than either can alone.
Before comparing what separates these poems, it is worth being clear about what unites them structurally — because the form itself carries meaning.
A dramatic monologue, as a poetic form, places one speaker at the centre. That speaker is not the poet. The speaker addresses someone (a listener we can only infer from context), and through that speech, reveals far more about themselves than they perhaps intend. The reader becomes a kind of detective, reading between the lines.
Both Ulysses and My Last Duchess do exactly this. Neither poem tells us what to think of its speaker. Tennyson and Browning both step back and let the voice do the work — and then let us sit with the discomfort of deciding what we have just heard.
This is the genius of the dramatic monologue: the speaker believes he is presenting himself well. The reader may not agree.
The Speakers: Ulysses and the Duke Side by Side
| Feature | Ulysses (Tennyson) | The Duke of Ferrara (Browning) |
|---|---|---|
| Historical/Mythical basis | Homer’s Odysseus / Dante’s Ulisse | Alfonso II, Duke of Ferrara (1533–97) |
| Setting | Ithaca, ancient Greece | Renaissance Italy |
| Listener | His old mariners | A marriage envoy from the Count of Tyrol |
| Subject of speech | His desire to sail again | His late wife’s portrait |
| Tone | Elevated, philosophical, yearning | Controlled, polished, menacing |
| Relationship to power | Power through heroic action | Power through ownership and silence |
| What he wants | Freedom to pursue experience | A compliant second wife |
| Moral complexity | Admirable ambition vs. abandonment | Charm masking tyranny |
Theme 1: Power and Control
This is where the two poems diverge most sharply — and where reading them together becomes genuinely illuminating.
Ulysses’ power is outward-facing. He commands men, he crosses seas, he battles fate itself. His final speech to his mariners is genuinely rousing — a call to “strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” His power is the kind Victorian readers admired openly. It is associated with exploration, ambition, the expansion of knowledge. Tennyson clearly respects his speaker, even if he also quietly questions him.
The Duke’s power is inward-facing and far more sinister. He controls through gaze, through narrative, through property. His wife’s smile, her blushes for strangers, her easy delight in small gifts — these enraged him because they escaped his control. She was, in his mind, insufficiently grateful for the “nine-hundred-years-old name” he had given her. So he issued a command. The poem never says the word “kill.” It does not need to.
What is remarkable about Browning’s technique here is that the Duke never loses his composure. He speaks of his wife’s death — and almost certainly his role in it — with the same cool aesthetic pleasure he uses to discuss the painting. He arranged for her smile to stop. Now it is frozen on canvas, and only he controls who sees it. The curtain he draws back over her portrait is the most chilling image in Victorian poetry. He has not lost her. He has contained her.
Ulysses seeks power over nature and time. The Duke seeks power over a woman — and achieves it through elimination.
Theme 2: The Treatment of Women
Tennyson’s poem is almost entirely a man’s world. Penelope barely exists in the text; she is gestured at briefly and dismissed. Telemachus, the dutiful son, gets a few respectful lines. But women are simply absent from Ulysses’ frame of reference. He is not hostile to women — he has just never thought of them as part of the story that matters.
Browning makes the woman central — and then shows us exactly how she was erased.
The Duchess is never named. She never speaks. We know her only through her husband’s description of her, and every detail he offers is meant as criticism. She smiled too readily. She blushed too easily. She appreciated a sunset or a ride on a white mule with the same warmth she showed her husband. This, he implies, was the problem. She could not rank pleasures properly. She did not understand that he was the supreme gift.
The poem is extraordinary precisely because the Duchess, despite being dead and silenced, feels more vivid than the Duke. Browning gives us just enough glimpses of her — generous, warm, unguarded — to make her erasure feel like a genuine loss. The Duke is eloquent. But she sounds like someone worth knowing.
This contrast matters for an exam or essay: Tennyson renders women invisible through indifference. Browning renders a woman visible in her absence — and then makes us furious about it.
Theme 3: Restlessness vs. Possession
Ulysses cannot stay still. The whole poem moves forward — out of Ithaca, toward the horizon, into the unknown. His dissatisfaction with domestic life is not cruelty; it is something more like existential hunger. He needs to do things, to know things. Even his description of Telemachus, patient and steady, carries an implied contrast: Telemachus is suited to stillness. Ulysses is not. And he has stopped pretending otherwise.
The Duke is the opposite. He does not want to move. He wants everything around him to be fixed, arranged, and owned. His palace is full of art objects — rare bronze sculptures, the portrait of his wife. Each object is carefully placed. Each is controlled. His ideal of a wife is not a living, breathing person with her own responses to the world; it is something closer to a particularly beautiful possession.
This is the key psychological difference between the two speakers. Ulysses’ restlessness drives him outward. The Duke’s need for control drives everything inward, into possession, silence, and ultimately death.
One man cannot bear to sit still. The other cannot bear anything to move without his permission.
Theme 4: Time, Age, and Mortality
Both speakers are acutely aware that time is not on their side.
Ulysses is old. He admits it without flinching. His body has been worn by travel; his men are similarly aged. And yet the final section of the poem is the most forward-looking, the most energised. He does not ask for more time. He asks for the courage to use what remains. The famous closing lines speak of old age not as defeat but as a condition within which heroism is still possible. This is Tennyson at his most personally felt — he wrote the poem after Arthur Hallam’s death, and the poem’s refusal to yield is really his own.
Browning’s Duke is not quite old, but he is done with one chapter and moving into another. His late wife is behind him — literally behind the curtain. He is already negotiating the terms of the next arrangement. There is something deeply cold about his efficiency. Grief does not appear to exist in him. Time for the Duke is not an enemy to be defied; it is a resource to be managed.
Mortality in Ulysses is noble. Mortality in My Last Duchess is something that happens to other people — specifically, to people who displease the Duke.
Form and Structure: How Each Poet Builds the Voice
Both poems use blank verse — unrhymed iambic pentameter. But they use it very differently, and that difference is entirely deliberate.
Tennyson’s blank verse in Ulysses is expansive. The lines breathe. Enjambment carries thought from one line to the next with the feeling of a wave that cannot be stopped. The rhythm feels organic, like someone genuinely working through his feelings aloud. Pauses fall where emotion demands them. The effect is of a man who thinks in big sweeping ideas.
Browning’s blank verse in My Last Duchess is technically rhyming couplets — but the rhymes are buried so deep under enjambment that you barely hear them. This is deliberate and brilliant. The Duke’s speech sounds natural, conversational, almost off-the-cuff. But it is actually tightly controlled. The rhymes are there, doing their work, just hidden. Browning is showing us, in the poem’s very sound, what the Duke does to his world: he imposes control while appearing relaxed and gracious.
Ulysses runs to 70 lines with no stanza breaks — one continuous forward movement.
My Last Duchess is 56 lines, one single stanza, no pauses offered to the listener.
Both poems refuse to give the reader a stopping point. Both pull you forward. But one does it with openness, the other with suffocation.
The Silent Listener: Who Are They Speaking To?
In dramatic monologue theory, the silent listener is crucial. Their presence (or implied presence) shapes everything the speaker says.
Ulysses speaks to his mariners — his old companions. They share a history. He is asking them to follow him again, to risk death with him one more time. There is genuine fellowship implied. His rhetoric is meant to inspire, and it does.
The Duke speaks to a marriage envoy — a man who represents the family of his potential next wife. He is, in effect, conducting a negotiation while pretending to have a casual art tour. Everything he says serves a dual purpose: to display his cultural refinement and to issue a warning. He is telling the envoy — and through him, the future Duchess — exactly what happened to the last one. The terrifying thing is that he knows the envoy understands. And he does not care.
Ulysses’ listener is his equal, his comrade. The Duke’s listener is his subordinate, his messenger.
The relationship with the listener tells us everything about how each speaker sees the world.
Victorian Context: What These Poems Were Really Saying
Both poems appeared in 1842 — the same year, in Tennyson’s first major collection and Browning’s Dramatic Lyrics. Victoria had been on the throne for five years. The British Empire was expanding. Questions of authority, masculinity, ambition, and the proper limits of power were very much alive.
Tennyson’s Ulysses was widely read as a Victorian ideal: the man who keeps striving, who refuses comfortable retirement, who serves a larger purpose than domestic ease. Many Victorian readers saw nothing troubling in him at all. He represented the spirit of exploration that was pushing British ships into every corner of the globe.
Browning’s Duke was read more uneasily. Browning was always more psychologically unsettling than Tennyson, more interested in the dark spaces inside human motivation. The Duke is the shadow self of Victorian masculine authority: the same insistence on rank, refinement, and control, but stripped of any pretence at higher purpose. He is not exploring the world. He is curating it. And the most dangerous thing in his collection turned out to be the woman he married.
Read together, the poems offer a complete picture: Victorian masculine authority at its most aspirational and its most corrupt.
Which Speaker Is More Trustworthy? The Unreliable Narrator Problem
This is one of the most productive questions for literary analysis — and it applies differently to each poem.
Ulysses is broadly reliable as a self-reporter. He says he is restless, and the poem’s energy confirms it. He says he wants to sail, and we believe him. His failure to mention Penelope, his apparent ease in leaving his kingdom — these are real questions about his character, but he is not actively deceiving anyone. He is simply a man for whom domestic life holds very little.
The Duke is unreliable in a much more calculated way. He presents himself as a reasonable man who was pushed too far by an ungrateful wife. But nothing he describes as a flaw in her sounds like a flaw at all. She was warm, generous, delighted by simple pleasures, grateful to her servants. He found this intolerable because it meant she distributed her warmth freely, not exclusively to him. His self-portrait as the aggrieved party is the poem’s central irony. He believes he has explained himself. He has condemned himself instead.
Both speakers control what they tell us. Only one of them is lying.
Comparison at a Glance
| Aspect | Ulysses (Tennyson) | My Last Duchess (Browning) |
|---|---|---|
| Published | 1842 | 1842 |
| Lines | 70 | 56 |
| Form | Blank verse, one stanza | Iambic pentameter couplets (hidden) |
| Tone | Yearning, philosophical, elevated | Controlled, polished, subtly threatening |
| Primary theme | Restlessness, ageing, ambition | Power, possession, jealousy |
| Speaker’s flaw | Self-focus, abandonment | Tyranny, murder by proxy |
| Treatment of women | Indifferent absence | Obsessive, fatal control |
| Listener | Mariners (equals) | Marriage envoy (inferior) |
| Emotional temperature | Warm, expansive | Cold, precise |
| Victorian ideal | The heroic explorer | The tyrannical collector |
| Moral verdict | Ambiguous (admirable but irresponsible) | Clearly condemned (but self-unaware) |
What Critics Have Said — And What They Missed
Most comparative essays on these poems stop at form. They note both are dramatic monologues, both use blank verse, both feature powerful Victorian men. Then they separate out the themes and move on.
What gets missed is the psychological architecture of each poem.
Tennyson was writing grief. The poem’s energy is not just philosophical ambition — it is the refusal to collapse under personal loss. Ulysses is, at one level, Tennyson himself saying: my friend is dead, and I will not be destroyed by it. That emotional reality gives the poem its heat.
Browning was writing a case study in what we would now call coercive control. The Duke is not simply arrogant; he is a precise portrait of a man who destroys anything that he cannot completely possess. Browning had real-life sources (Alfonso II of Ferrara is widely accepted as the historical model), and he renders the type with a clarity that psychologists working on domestic abuse patterns have found unsettlingly accurate.
Read as purely aesthetic objects, these are two beautiful Victorian poems. Read as documents of their cultural moment, they are also a debate about what power does to the people who wield it — and the people who stand in their way.
Common Misconceptions
Misconception 1: “Both speakers are equally villainous.” They are not. Ulysses is self-absorbed and may be escaping responsibility, but there is no victim in his poem. The Duke has almost certainly arranged the murder of his wife. The moral weight is completely different.
Misconception 2: “The dramatic monologue form makes the speaker’s views the poet’s views.” The whole point of the form is that the speaker is not the poet. Browning does not endorse the Duke any more than Tennyson endorses abandoning one’s kingdom. The form exists precisely to create critical distance.
Misconception 3: “My Last Duchess explicitly says the Duchess was killed.” It does not. The Duke says he “gave commands,” after which “all smiles stopped together.” The interpretation that he ordered her death is strongly supported by the text, but Browning deliberately leaves just enough ambiguity. This is a feature, not an oversight.
Misconception 4: “Ulysses is purely optimistic.” Read more carefully. Ulysses admits his men are old and worn. He says they may die. He knows the goal is “the Happy Isles,” which in mythology is where the heroic dead go. Some scholars read the poem as Ulysses planning a noble, deliberate death. The poem is not simply a motivational speech.
Expert Tips for Exam and Essay Writing
Tip 1: Always name the form precisely. Both are dramatic monologues, but the term means more than “a poem with one speaker.” Bring in the silent listener, the gap between what the speaker intends and what the reader perceives, and the way Browning and Tennyson use the form differently.
Tip 2: Compare the listeners, not just the speakers. The choice of listener (mariners vs. envoy) reveals each speaker’s relationship to power. This is a more original analytical move than simply listing themes.
Tip 3: Use specific quotations with precision. “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield” is the emotional climax of Ulysses — it earns its position through the 66 lines that precede it. “I gave commands” is the most chilling moment in My Last Duchess — note what it does and does not say.
Tip 4: Mention the real-world sources. Tennyson drew from Homer and Dante’s Ulysses. Browning drew from historical records about Alfonso II of Ferrara. Bringing in these sources shows wider reading and strengthens an argument about authorial intent.
Tip 5: Resist the temptation to rank the poems. Neither poem is “better.” They are doing different things. A strong essay holds both in tension rather than declaring a winner.
Suggestions for Lingualitera.com
- Ulysses by Alfred Lord Tennyson – A Complete Analysis
- Literary Terms in English Literature: The Complete Guide
- Alfred Lord Tennyson: Life, 7 Best Works
- Hamartia in Oedipus Rex and Macbeth: A Deep Comparative Study
- Macbeth by William Shakespeare: Complete Explanation
Recommended External References
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the primary similarity between Ulysses and My Last Duchess?
Both are dramatic monologues ,poems in which a single speaker, not the poet, addresses an implied listener. Both speakers are powerful men in positions of authority. Both reveal their character through what they say , and sometimes more revealingly through what they choose not to say. Written in the same year (1842), they represent opposite poles of Victorian masculine identity.
How does the use of iambic pentameter differ in the two poems?
Tennyson’s Ulysses uses open, flowing blank verse with frequent enjambment that creates a sense of forward momentum and expansive thought. Browning’s My Last Duchess technically uses rhyming couplets, but the rhymes are so deeply buried under enjambment and conversational phrasing that they become nearly inaudible. This mirrors the Duke’s personality: control concealed beneath apparent ease.
Is the Duchess actually killed in My Last Duchess?
Browning never states this directly. The Duke says he gave commands, after which his wife’s smiles stopped entirely. The strong implication, supported by the poem’s historical context (Alfonso II of Ferrara’s wife died young under unclear circumstances), is that he ordered her death. Browning leaves just enough ambiguity to make the reader do the final interpretive work — and that discomfort is deliberate.
Why is Ulysses considered a Victorian hero despite his flaws?
Victorian readers valued ambition, endurance, and the refusal to accept limitation. Ulysses embodies all three. His restlessness, his insistence on striving even in old age, resonated deeply with an era of global exploration and imperial confidence. His failure to value domesticity or consider Penelope was generally not read as a flaw by his original audience. Modern readers are often less forgiving.
Conclusion
Ulysses and My Last Duchess are not simply two famous Victorian poems that happen to share a form. Read together, they become a remarkable double portrait of what power looks and sounds like when it speaks for itself.
Tennyson gives us the version of masculine authority that Victorian England wanted to celebrate: restless, philosophical, forward-looking, courageous in the face of age and death. His Ulysses is a hero with shadows, not a villain. He abandons his kingdom and his wife, but he calls his men as equals and faces the unknown without flinching.
Browning gives us the version that Victorian England preferred not to examine too closely: cultivated, articulate, self-certain, and willing to destroy whatever he could not control. His Duke is not a monster in appearance. He is charming. That is exactly the point.
The dramatic monologue comparison of Ulysses and My Last Duchess reveals something that neither poem achieves entirely on its own: that heroism and tyranny can wear the same costume, speak in the same iambic pentameter, and walk into the same room looking equally self-possessed. The difference is in what each speaker has done with the people around him.
And that, in the end, is what makes literature worth reading closely.
