My Last Duchess, Punishment, and Capital Punishment Poems involving Decentralization and Marginalization

¶ … Last Duchess';'Punishment'; 'Capital Punishment' Three Poems of Decentralization and Marginalization: Browning's "My Last Duchess; Heaney's "Punishment"; and Alexie's "Capital Punishment" Within the poems "My Last Duchess" by Robert Browning; Punishment by Seamus Heaney; and "Capital Punishment" by Sherman Alexie, all three authors deal, although in much different ways, with shifting, and often surprising, relationships between centrality and marginality: of speaker, subject, or both.

In Browning's "My Last Duchess, for example the speaker, a duke (the sort of figure one least expects to say or do anything that might cause him to be seen as "marginal," or even unusual, recollects in detail the various jealousy-provoking and ultimately fatal behaviors of his "last duchess." These, at least in the speaker's mind, have given him justifiable cause to kill her. All that remains of her now is her portrait on the wall.

In this essay, I will analyze ways that all three poems deal thematically with the tensions and interplay between centralization and marginalization. Perhaps the dead Duchess's greatest "mistake," according to her now-widowed husband, was, ironically, not "marginalizing" him enough (with praise, obeisance, and other exaltations of his royal rank). Such "positive marginalization" (so to speak) would, it seems, have made him less angry at her and consequently less self-justified in his killing of her.

However, as he states instead: Somehow - I know not how - as if she ranked My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name With anybody's gift. (lines 32-34) The speaker's deliberate, sneering repetition of the word "gift" underscores the powerfulness of his feelings about having had that "gift" rejected by the Duchess.

The Duchess's lack of discrimination in this respect seems to have been her "crime." As the speaker adds a few lines later: Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt, Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without Much the same smile? (lines 43-45) The speaker "passed her" but so did others, and to him and them alike, she offered the same "smile." The most surprising aspects of this poem, those that "decentralize" the speaker's status into a marginal one (i.e., madman; cold-blooded murderer; even sexual sadist) are that (1) the speaker believes murdering his wife was justified; and (2) he feels no remorse for murdering her.

Similarly, in Heaney's "Punishment," a woman has been punished for adultery committed sometime in the past. As the speaker of this poem states: Little adulteress, before they punished you were flaxen-haired, undernourished, and your tar-black face was beautiful. (Lines 3-27) However, unlike Browning's speaker in "The Last Duchess," Heaney's speaker within "Punishment" is brimming with emotions, and these are clearly spawned by the speaker's sense of his own, associated, complicity in the hanged woman's death. The dead woman's "crime," the poem implies, is not.