The Marriage Portrait
I was an English major in college, but I have not read a text with the same intense scrutiny as I did then since…then. (That would be 1998 for purposes of tabulation and judgement.) Well, maybe I did back in 2019 when I (haphazardly?) decided to read one Shakespeare play per month. I mean, I do think I read carefully and with a critical eye and all that jazz, but it’s still different. Who has time to consider and then write 10-page papers about the meanings and various uses of “the”? (Just to exaggerate a tiny bit…)
My high school’s alumnae book group is reading The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell. (It’s not as soul-piercing as Hamnet [adored it!], but if you liked O’Farrell’s style with that one, you may like this one. As for me, I’m not an enormous fan of her flowy, present-tense style as it reminds me of film direction, but it does result in a different and engaging type of read.)
Here’s what I’ve loved, though: The Marriage Portrait is historical fiction about 16th-century Italian noblewoman Lucrezia di Cosimo de’Medici and her marriage to Alfonso II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara. O’Farrell found her inspiration in the Robert Browning poem “The Last Duchess,” an account of Alfonso discussing a portrait of his deceased bride, Lucrezia. I’ve had the opportunity to not only read the poem but some analysis of it as well … which took me right back to my collegiate days. It’s been an exercise in tracking careful symbolism, parsing and detecting rhythm, and searching for beauty in hidden and obscured language tricks. (The one I found most intriguing was when Browning switches from “her” to “it,” which pretty much says it all if you’ve read the book.)
So, on this snowy Boston day — a perfect day for poetry? — I thought I’d share Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” with you. It’s too long to share in this caption, so you can swipe through to read it in the subsequent slides. It’s not ideal, as Browning didn’t use line breaks as sentence breaks, but it’ll have to do. Maybe try reading it aloud?
Images below from Poetry Foundation’s entry on ‘My Last Duchess’ by Robert Browning.
{Click to enlarge.}
originally published on instagram