The Ways Of Revealing

Both poems “Hazel tells LaVerne” by Katharyn Hown Machan and “My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning uses unique ways to reveal the speakers. The speakers of each poem reveal something about themselves as they try to narrate a story.

The speaker of the “Hazel tells LaVerne” story repeats the line “me a princess,” indicating that her bluster is just a front for her dreams. The word choice and humorous tone of Machan’s story also reveal much about Hazel’s personality and position. The ways she uses slang, replacement of spellings, and the neglect of punctuation, a reader learn a great deal about the character, and also it shows that she has no or little of education.

The speaker of Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess” uses more complicated language, and he believes that he is in control of the narrative situation, but the more he talks the more he reveals about his true desires and motives. His excursuses are what give him away; as he pauses to consider how he should express something, he gives us the opportunity to analyze not only the content of his speech but his expression of it as well. The way that he reveals himself is trough monologue. The Duke of Ferrara was a very overconfident man. He did not seem to care about the happiness of his wife, only about his own.

Both stories reveal their speakers trough different ways. Poems “Hazel tells LaVerne” and “My Last Duchess” show how by use of language, punctuation, and tone speakers can be revealed.