Throughout the poem, how does the speaker reveals more about

himself and his true character than he intends? Robert Browning's

"My Last Duchess"
Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue “My Last Duchess” is his best-known and most
frequently anthologized poem. What makes it so emotionally effective is the strong
contrast between the speaker and the subject of his monologue. The speaker is a
thoroughly loathsome man, while his last duchess was obviously not only a beautiful but
a loving and lovable young woman. The woman and the man are like Beauty and the
Beast.
The arrogant Duke, who had the exceedingly bad taste to show a portrait of his dead wife
to the representative of the man whose daughter he was planning to marry, reveals his
character in everything he says--but Browning has added a peculiar touch which serves to
characterize the Duke even more effectively than the contents of his monologue. That is
to be found in the open couplets which are so deliberately ragged, staggered, awkward,
discordant and forced that they serve as proof of the Duke’s own admission that he has
no skill in speech and highlight his ignorance, insensitivity and vulgarity. Here are a few
examples:-

That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,

looking as if she were alive. I call
and seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
How such a glance came there; so, not the first

The bough of cherries some officious fool

broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse,
E’en then would be some stooping, and I choose
As if alive. Will’t please you rise? We’ll meet
The Company below, then. I repeat,
Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!

It the entire poem is read with particular attention to the open couplets, the calculated
badness of the meter and the rhymes becomes strikingly obvious.
The Duke’s monologue fails to explain exactly what it was he found wrong with his lovely
young wife. But the evidence he gives against himself seems to lead to the conclusion that
he wanted to get rid of her because she could not be like him—which would have been
the last thing she could have done and the last thing that would ever have occurred to
her.