All three poems have something very similar in common, that is that all three of them are based around relationships and that each speaker reveals more than they intend too. In each of the poems there is a main speaker.
In "Porphyria's Lover" the speaker is a male, in "My Last Duchess" the speaker is a male and in "The Cleaner" the speaker is a female. Each of the speakers talks about relationships in one way or another through the poem. All the poems are set in a different period, "Porphyria's Lover" was in the nineteenth century, "My Last Duchess" was in the fourteenth or fifteenth century and "The Cleaner" was in the twentieth century.The speaker in "Porphyria's Lover" is male.
His character is conveyed by the words "sullen" and "vex". All these words show that the personality of the speaker is that he is quiet. He does not seem to have very good manners because when Porphyria enters the house her lover just sits there and lets her get on with it by lighting the fire, and she has to go to him when it should havebeen him meeting her from the front he door and bringing her into an already warm house. In "My Last Duchess" the speaker again is a male.
The speaker is the Duke; the poem is in his picture gallery of which he is very proud.Compared to the man in "Porphyria's Lover" the Duke has manners, "Will't please you rise? ". The Duke seems very arrogant, he appears to be well educated, have a good vocabulary and have a very good sentence structure. In "The Cleaner" the speaker is a woman, she appears to have a nice personality and at the same time she seems to spy an awful lot, which does not make her a nice person.
You can tell that she has not been well educated because she uses colloquial speech in her sentences, she has a very simple vocabulary and her sentences are very short.The setting in all the poem's differ from each other. In "Porphyria's Lover" the setting is in a cottage in the country by a lake and s proberly very quiet. In "My last Duchess" the setting is in the Duke's picture gallery, which is in his Palace, this is defiantly not going to be a quiet place unlike in "Porphyria's Lover". In "Cleaner" the setting is in the Halls of Residence at the University which she works at. Porphyria's lover lives in a house alone in the country.
The opening lines to the poem shows that he is lonely and there is nothing much to do but just sit around.This is shown by the way he talks about the weather "The rain set early in tonight" and "The sullen wind was soon awake". Then Porphyria enters, "When glided in Porphyria", the word "glided" shows that she enters very silently, it is an open vowel word the "I" sound is stressed to make it softer. The effect that Porphyria has on the house when she enters the house is very dominating; she shut the door behind her and went straight to light the fire, "And kneeled and made a cheerless grate".She is a lot higher class than he is, this is shown when she lights the fire, when she would rather get her gloves dirty than her hands, "And laid her soiled gloves by".
From the line "But passion sometimes would prevail" the poem pivots because before this point she had been the active and dominating one and he had been very passive. Now he becomes dominating. He says "While I debated what to do", suggesting that she was in his hands and he was in control. Now he seems to be the quite possessive over her, "That moment she was mine, mine,fair", this shows how he wants her to be his forever.
After his tone of voice changes, not too dramatic, he says "In one long yellow string I wound" "Three times her little throat around", "And strangled her", so he has now killed her for no reason and he is sure she felt no pain at all "I am quite sure she felt no pain". He does not think he has done anything wrong. "As a shut bud that holds a bee" suggests that when you open a bud with a bee in it, it will sting you, so he wants open her eyes to see what the expression in her eyes showed, it might be that she was in pain and angry or she was happy.He looked in them and thought that she was laughing, "Laughed the blue eyes without stain".
Alliteration is used "Blushed bright beneath the burning kiss" this makes it jolly and not harsh. The last line "And yet God has not said a work! " means he has a clear conscience, nothing has made him feel bad or guilty. As far as he is concerned he has not been struck by a thunderbolt so everything appears fine. At the end he reveals that he is a murderer and thinks he has not done anything wrong. In "My Last Duchess" the Duke lives in a Palace and the poem is based in his picture gallery.The opening sentence "That's my lady duchess painted on the wall" this suggests that he has had a number of Duchess's.
He does not have any feelings for her he just thinks of her as a painting, "That piece a wonder". She was emotional and that is why he did not like her. Unlike in "Porphyria's Lover" the lover liked Porphyria but killed her because he thought that was what she wanted. The Duke hates the way his wife is easily pleased. Everything that she likes he hates, she seems very sentimental.
He is a very proud and very classy man he talks a lot about Fra Pandolf the artist who drew the portrait. I gave commands" shows that he too killed his wife but he got somebody else to do it for him. "The Count you master's known munificence" he is talking to a servant of The Count. "Porphyria's Lover" and "My Last Duchess" are by the same poet. "My Last Duchess" is set in an earlier period by several hundred years.
Both the speaking voices are male. The girlfriends or wives both die and both the men are murderers. "The Cleaner" is about a cleaner who works in the Halls of Residence in a University. She works cleaning students' rooms.
In the opening line she says basically that she does not really like men, she has contempt for them, "I've seen it all you know. Men". She talks about students there as if she is their mother although she says she does feel like their mother "I feel a mother like". She says that when they finished with a younger girl who will be staying a year or so longer and they are just leaving a girl can get hurt, "And by Christmas" "They've finished here, they've gone.
A girl" "can get hurt. " She talks to the friends and gives them advice. "Twenty stubs in the ashtray", saying that they have been smoking.The last line "I can tell a lot from that", saying that they smoke in their rooms when they should not or they have had someone of the opposite sex round when they should not have. The speaker reveals that she is kind and caring but towards the end she spy's quite a lot on them. The poem is quite different from "Porphyria's Lover" and "My Last Duchess" because they involve killing.
"The Cleaner" just talks about issues like smoking and sex. The structures of all the poems are different. The structure of "Porphyria's Lover" is ABAB, which is quite tight and formal. My Last Duchess" is AABB, which has a strong rhyme."The Cleaner" has no rhyme there are six four lined verses and one last line. In the end of each story something is revealed about each of the speakers.
In "Porphyria's Lover" the lover is revealed to be a murderer, but the fact that he just killed her for no reason at all was horrible. In "My Last Duchess" the same again, the Duke is revealed to have got someone else to kill his wife, he killed his wife because he did not like the way she was. In "The Cleaner" the speaker is revealed to hate men and she thinks they are sly and only after one thing.
