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...
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