Or that in you disgusts me here you miss, Quite clear to such an one, and say, ‘Just this In speech-which I have not-to make your will This sort of trifling? Even had you skill He is a Duke who are they? Yet their gifts inspire the same response from the Duchess as the Duke’s lavish gifts. He reveals perhaps more than he intends to with this remark, showing that he was proud, haughty, perhaps even slightly insecure and jealous (that potential sexual impotence or sterility again), and didn’t like the fact that his wife, who had married a Duke with a noble lineage stretching back almost a millennium, treated his gifts the same as those from ‘anybody’.Īnd by these ‘anybodies’ the Duke really means, nobodies, for that is what he considers them to be next to him. Now we get to the thrust of the Duke’s grievance with his dead wife. In short, the Duchess was easily pleased – too easily pleased for the Duke’s liking. a flower) the Duke himself brought to her for her to wear on her dress, or even the beautiful sunset (and the coming of night – when people’s thoughts might turn in an amorous direction), some cherries from the orchard someone who worked for the Duke had brought for her to eat, or a mule (‘white’ suggesting purity, but the sterility of the mule – which cannot breed – perhaps hinting that the Duke himself, when the Duchess ‘rode’ him, was too old to get her pregnant). Would draw from her alike the approving speech,Īll of the trivial gifts and tokens people brought the Duchess were greeted with the same blush of joy, whether it was a ‘favour’ (e.g.
She rode with round the terrace-all and each The bough of cherries some officious foolīroke in the orchard for her, the white mule The dropping of the daylight in the West, Sir, ’twas all one! My favour at her breast, What’s more, she had a roving eye (‘her looks went everywhere’), so even though she was married to the Duke, she sought out praise and flattery from other people (especially men).
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