The Ways of Revealing

Both poems “Hazel tells LaVerne” by Katharyn Hown Machan and “My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning uses unique ways to reveal the speakers. The speakers of each poem reveal something about themselves as they try to narrate a story.

The speaker of the “Hazel tells LaVerne” story repeats the line “me a princess,” indicating that her bluster is just a front for her dreams. The word choice and humorous tone of Machan’s story also reveal much about Hazel’s personality and position. The ways she uses slang, replacement of spellings, and the neglect of punctuation, a reader learn a great deal about the character, and also it shows that she has no or little of education.

The speaker of Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess” uses more complicated language, and he believes that he is in control of the narrative situation, but the more he talks the more he reveals about