My Last Duchess

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Literary Devices

Rhyme

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Literary Devices Rhyme

“My Last Duchess” consists of twenty-eight rhyming couplets, which means the poem’s rhyme scheme is AABBCCDD, and so on. All the rhymes in the poem are exact, and they also take a so-called “masculine” form, which means they all fall on the final stressed syllable of each line. Two couplets do slightly strain the expectation for exact rhyme. For instance, the words “countenance” and “glance” (lines 7 and 8) don’t quite match perfectly, since countenance features a slightly more closed A sound than glance. A similarly subtle distinction between vowel sounds separates “munificence” and “pretense” (lines 49 and 50). But what’s more significant than these differences is the fact that most of the rhyming pairs form open or run-on couplets, which occur when the rhyming lines are enjambed rather than end-stopped. As an example, consider lines 31–35:

She thanked men—good! but thanked
Somehow—I know not how—as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody’s gift. Who’d stoop to blame
This sort of trifling?

All four of the complete lines reproduced here are enjambed. This feature diminishes the force of the rhymes, which can pass by almost without notice since there isn’t a pause at the end of each line to emphasize them. Without the usual sense of closure that end-stopped lines bring, the poem’s heroic couplets seem decidedly unheroic. Hence, they comically subvert the Duke’s air of self-importance.

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