The poem is, as I have remarked, typical of a whole class of Browning's poetry. These poems are usually called dramatic monologues, but perhaps the title given to them by Stopford Brooke is on the whole more suggestive. He calls them imaginative representations.
These poems are, in the first place, the utterance of one person, at a single time, and in one place. Some individual is influenced or induced by some unusual opportunity or circumstance to reveal himself. The veil which conceals his inmost heart is lifted for a moment and we get a glimpse into its depths.
They have a certain dramatic element. Browning himself styled this poem a dramatic romance. They are dramatic in that they are objective as regards the author; the poet is not uttering his own thoughts. The circumstances under which the monologue is spoken are usually dramatic (i.e., such as a playwright might choose to bring out some trait of character), the background, scenery, and even the action is vividly suggested, and there are usually subsidiary figures whose attitude towards the central actor is carefully indicated.
The chief point to notice about these poems is that the poet studies not merely an individual as such, the working out of passion in a single soul, but he takes that individual as a type of some special period, some phase of historical development, some special era of thought. It was Browning's way of using history for poetical purposes, and it was completely his own. This poem is not a very good example, because the personages and events described are not peculiar to any one epoch, but may occur wherever there are two people unhappily married. But even here we have in the Duke not only an intensely interesting, even if objectionable, type of human being, but the concentrated essence of a certain side of the Italian Renaissance.
Browning, in his series of imaginative representations has covered a big field. Artemis Prologuizer, Caliban on Setebos, The Bishop Orders his Tomb, Fra Lippo Lippi, A Death in the Desert, Cleon, and many others cover an immense range, from Greek mythology through early and late Renaissance down to the modern life of Europe. "The poet can place us with ease and truth at Corinth, Athens or Rome, in Paris, Vienna or London, and wherever we go with him we are at home." Scenery, character, time, place, and action are all suitably and harmoniously blended, the characters are vividly alive. The qualifications which Browning brought to these poems were, first, a wide historical knowledge, not so much of separate events as of the main trend of thought in a given period; an intense imaginative power; a wide knowledge of human nature; and last, but not least, in his Italian poems, a familiar acquaintance with "a multitude of small intimate details of the customs, clothing, architecture, popular dress, talk and scenery of the towns and country of Italy from the thirteenth century to modern times." The poem under consideration gives us only a glimpse of the skill with which Browning handles this particular type; but I hope it will be sufficient to induce those who are not acquainted with Browning's other work to study it further.
CHRISTMAS SHOPPING
"O whither are you going,
My friend, I'd fain be knowing,
O whither are you going
With that air of do-and-dare?
O what the destination
Of your grim determination,
Of your bloody resolution
And your fierce defiant stare?"
"I am going Christmas shopping,"
Said the hero, freely mopping
Beads of nervous perspiration
From his broad and gallant brow,
"I am going forth to-day
In this bellicose array
To do my Christmas shopping,
Or to perish in the fray."
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