Who’s here from English

Ralph Cotterill passed away on 7/05/23 at 91 years of age. Ralph was a tremendously talented stage and film actor, having studied his craft at the Drama Centre in London in the 1950s before joining the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1960s. In 1973 he came to Australia, where his abilities brought him wide-ranging roles and many plaudits. Away from the lights and camera Ralph was not one to draw attention to himself, yet he did so by sheer weight of his presence. Intelligent, well-read, humble; a great actor and irreplaceable friend. R.I.P. Ralph, you will be missed by all: those who witnessed you on stage and those of us lucky enough to know you 🙏

I chose to read this (well I listened to the video while reading along) for a course in a creative writing masters program. Wonderfully written and masterfully recited. Thank you for posting this almost 8 years ago for me to find today.

Probably the best thing that I heard on the internet about this poem's recitation..

I love this reading of the poem; it's so dark but restrained in its delivery!

Tried to memorize this forty years ago. Decided to try again. This is a great help. Brilliant. Thank you.

Very good video. It gave me the chills when he says he gave the command.

I always struggle with interpreting syntax the most. Your reading helped me gain more insight into how the lines work. I find it intriguing that when read aloud, every performer I've seen reads "I call/that piece a wonder, now" without a pause between "wonder" and "now" despite the comma, which only makes me wonder about the significance of the comma.

It's worth noting that the "Neptune taming a sea-horse" reference in the poem is often misunderstood. Browning is not alluding to the equine-like Hippocampus, the tiny sea creature which immediately comes to mind; he is implying the mythological horse/s which drew Neptune's chariot. The Trevi fountain in Rome centres around this image. According to Roman mythology, Neptune is not only in charge of all the rivers, springs and waters, he is also lord of horses. Browning undoubtedly referenced Neptune to heighten the Duke's chauvinism in regard to his title and pedigree, since Neptune is considered the progenitor god of the Faliscans (an original Latin tribe) otherwise known as Neptunia proles.

Just beautiful

This is a beautiful performance of a beautiful poem!

What an excellent reading sir. Superb

thank you so much for this i really needed something that actually made sense!

Amazing!

Ralph was excellent

MAJESTICALLY BEAUTIFUL WORK...DEAR...DEAR..Browning ..RIP....

There is some debate as to the degree of the Duke's malevolence. Is he just a haughty aristocrat who sent his former wife to a nunnery over her flirtatious nature -- a greedy, manipulative man anxious about securing a sizeable dowry from the father of his future wife? Or is he, as others see him, a psychopathic murderer with an insatiable lust for ownership of all that he desires -- an evil and pernicious narcissist? It has been suggested by some analysts that the Duke must have killed the last Duchess because he twice remarks, "looking as if she were alive". Browning made it clear that it was his intention to have the Duke a murderer, and perhaps he'd have preferred we assume it so for the purposes of the poem. But whether one should be pressed to interpret the poem in the manner it was intended or elect to draw upon history's account of the story is moot. It would still be reasonable to look at her portrait and comment on her lifelike appearance were the artist considerably skilled, which we assume Pandolf must have been. Literature, like any art form, should be open to interpretation; one should be free to make one's own conclusions. In the end, the beholder's eye is paramount. Whatever your perspective, "My Last Duchess" certainly has many elements to it which may be construed in various ways. That is why it is such a clever, insightful poem. It is a poem that keeps giving -- the more you read and study it, the more questions arise. This is the hallmark of truly great poetry. Accordingly, anyone has a right to interpret words and phrases in the poem in the manner he or she chooses. Our universe is complex, and science shows us that uncertainties and anomalies are an integral part of its fabric. Each of us is unique in perspective, a factor crucial in our survival and progression as a heterogeneous species. So it is essential that we are not confined in our thinking to rigid evaluation frameworks; an educational system that plies a think-as-I-think model and fosters the notion of an irrefutable academia aids in the demise of our most valuable assets: imagination and intuition. Some claim that the poem is not about the Duke of Ferrara. While it may be apposite in regard to the shaping of an academic study of the poem to not invoke the real Duke, the fact is that Browning was indeed inspired by this very story. In its original publication, the poem was entitled "I. Italy," the companion piece to "II. France" under the general title "Italy and France." "My Last Duchess" (which states the setting as "Ferrara" after the title), is a byproduct of Browning's research for "Sordello", during which he read about Alfonso II d'Este, the fifth Duke of Ferrara and patron of the writer Tasso. Staying "inside the poem" is sometimes advised, but who can say for sure what Browning's intentions were or precisely where the seed lay in some of his references? Was he being deliberately ambiguous? Was he leaving room for uncertainty to provoke debate? Did he himself have doubts, as all writers do, about some of the deeper inferences of his words and the ways in which they might be understood? The human mind is mercurial; both writer and reader are capable of ambivalence . Some interpret the "never read strangers like you that pictured countenance...but to myself they turned" line as proof that the Duke had made many other proposals of dowry from a multiplicity of prospective wives; but this is pure speculation. Though we may assume there were others, especially if one chooses to draw upon history's account of Alfonso, the line more likely suggests the Duke's propensity to gloat, at any opportunity and with anyone, over his new-found ability to control his former wife's expression and behaviour. Many see the Duke as a pretentious name-dropper, and that appears to be the case, particularly when he mentions the sculptor -- Claus of Innsbruck -- who cast Neptune taming a seahorse in bronze for him The Duke ensures that the emissary is made well aware of the name in an attempt to further elevate his stature by association. However, earlier in the poem he says "I said Fra Pandolf by design". He stresses "Fra" Pandolf for a different reason: not to name-drop but to make a point of the Duchess's flirtations with the likes of anyone. Fra Pandolf is, we suspect, a very good painter, but he is also a monk, and monks are supposedly celibate. The Duke infers a belief that a virtuous woman would not allow herself to blush in the presence of a man of religion. It's clear that he thinks this is an indication of sexual arousal. Browning uses double-entendre and innuendo quite liberally: "spot of joy", "white mule" and "bough of cherries", suggestive of the Duke's claims of infidelity or, at least, immorality on the part of the Duchess. "Such stuff was courtesy, she thought," he says, "and cause enough for calling up that spot of joy," alluding to his suspicions that the Duchess's take on Fra Pandolf's requests during the painting were misinterpreted. He thinks that she would have taken the painter's comments -- whatever they may have been because the Duke was obviously not present during the sitting (he says, "PERHAPS Fra Pandolf chanced to say") -- as flattery, whereas, as far as the Duke is concerned, the painter would have had nothing other than the most professional of intentions in mind. In a sense, the Duke is trying to ease his conscience, if he has one at all, by telling the emissary about his former wife's indiscretions. He makes her out to be a floozy who could flush with excitement over anything and anyone. At the same time, he gloats over his position and his ability to dispose of her at his whim, sending an unmistakable warning to the emissary (whose job it is to act as a conduit between the two parties) that the next Duchess should behave in accordance with the snobbish requirements of peerage as well as the expectations of a husband prone to jealousy. She should expect neither guidance nor tuition in the matter following the marriage; the Duke has plainly disclosed that he chooses "never to stoop." Browning's intention, it is thought, was to satirise the superciliousness of the elite and, in particular, the attitudes towards women of men of position during his time. He has done an excellent job of that. Furthermore, he has given us insight into the intricacies of power and possession, the subtleties of desire and denial, and the ambiguities of passion and paranoia. This poem is an intriguing psychological study, and the complexities of the human mind validate the position that there is no such animal as a definitive analysis of anything. To claim otherwise is plain arrogance. Footnote: Susanne Langer's "Philosophy in a New Key" discusses two forms of symbolism, the discursive and presentational. The excerpt below highlights their differences and gives insight into the disparity of opinion that abounds in poetry analysis, i.e., the general lack of consensus between rational modes of interpretation and more intuitive methods. Quote: "Discursive symbolism is temporal, requiring time to communicate itself through a linear progression of words, controlled by logical, syntactic relations and limited by word denotations. Scientific uses of language are discursive; the words themselves should be transparent, pointing to a precise meaning. There should be no sense of their sound, other possible uses, what they look like on the page, etc. Presentational symbolism is spatial, requiring no time to be grasped as a whole and not subject to the constraints of logic or extrinsic structures. A painting is a good example of presentational symbolism. While language is by nature discursive, all literary uses of language pull toward more presentational forms of symbolic transformation, and poetry is the most directly presentational use of language. Poetry calls attention to the words themselves-their sounds, the rhythms they create, their look and arrangement on the page, their connotations and "emotional baggage," their previous uses in other contexts. In this way, poetry undermines the discursive nature of its medium, language. In fact, a poem demands re-reading, so that individual sections can be understood in the light of an awareness of the whole piece. However, poetry is never purely presentational; its richness and ability to convey both rational and intuitive meanings simultaneously stem from the tension between the discursive and presentational modes. A poem never has a single, definitive meaning, so the key question to ask is not what but rather how a poem means. For this reason, a poem can never be completely translated into another language but must be read in its original form to be fully understood and appreciated."

An amazing piece.The Duke though

Condolences for the loss of Ralph Cotteril R.I.P.

Wow..I have a poetry recitation competition ... This video will come handy to practice 😄

Thank you for posting this marvellous performance of Browning's marvellous - and most famous - internal monologue. With the poet's genius for inhabiting different persona through the manipulation of language I cannot help but think he would have celebrated Ralph Cotterill's interpretation. (And on 'interpretation' in another sense, may I say that, like Philip Larkin's rejection of the 'myth kitty' recourse to historical context in understanding, the deadly animus of the Duke towards his late Duchess remains evident to me, at least, after many years of reading. A nunnery?? Spare me the bathos!)

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This man is such a great actor, he should look into voice acting.

What song is playing in the backround?

Today Iam going to say this poem