The Faint Half-Blush That Dies Along Her Throat

by Mark Steyn
Steyn's Sunday Poem
March 8, 2020

https://www.steynonline.com/10103/the-faint-half-blush-that-dies-along-her-throat

Welcome to this weekend's entry in our Mark Steyn Club anthology of video poetry - and by sheer coincidence it's by a writer Joe Biden quoted in his Super Thursday victory speech:

To paraphrase the poet Robert Browning, our reach should exceed our grasp. And my reach does exceed our grasp, because I believe we can grasp whatever we reach for.

Er, okay. Close enough for government work. What Browning actually wrote, in his poem about the painter Andrea del Sarto, was:

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a heaven for?

One thing a heaven's for is one's late loves - which is the subject of the Browning poem I've chosen, after some prompting by our film columnist Kathy Shaidle. My Last Duchess is an ingenious piece first published by the poet in his Dramatic Lyrics of 1842. In this video I discuss the background to the work and a little bit of Browning's life, and then give it a go. To watch My Last Duchess, please click here and log-in.

If you'd like to catch up on earlier poems in the series, you can find them on our Sunday Poems home page. As with Tales for Our Time and our music specials and The Mark Steyn Show, we're archiving my video poetry in an easy-to-access Netflix-style tile format that we hope makes it the work of moments to prowl around and alight on something that piques your interest of a weekend, whether Kipling or Keats. One other bonus of Steyn Club membership is that you can enjoy much of our content in whichever is your preferred form - video, audio, text. So, if you'd rather hear me read My Last Duchess off-camera, please click here.

Steyn's Sunday Poem is made possible by members of The Mark Steyn Club. We launched the Steyn Club over two years ago, and in this our third season I'm immensely heartened by all the longtime SteynOnline regulars - from Fargo to Fiji, Madrid to Malaysia, West Virginia to Witless Bay - who've signed up to be a part of it. Membership in The Mark Steyn Club also comes with non-poetic benefits, including:

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One other benefit to Club Membership is our Comment Club privileges. So, if you like or dislike this feature, or consider my poem reading a bust, then feel free to comment away below. Please do stay on topic on all our comment threads, because that's the way to keep them focused and readable. With that caution, have at it (in verse, if you wish).

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17 Reader Comments

Kitty Bits • Mar 17, 2020 at 23:29

I wish I could hear that wax recording of Robert Browning's voice.

Jennifer • Mar 15, 2020 at 14:54

I have been watching the Masterpiece series "Victoria", and I only just finished the episode where the manipulative and emotionally abusive Duke of Monmouth has had his unfaithful wife imprisoned in an insane assylum. Apparently she did not appreciate "gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name".

While it is easy to sympathize with the poor 14-year-old bride of Ferrara, killed for smiling too much, or the (fictionalized) Duchess of Monmouth, the latest Duchess of Sussex seems to be rejecting the gift of her title out of wokeness, and not because she has actually been abused by the so-called patriarchy. (Maybe she blames the matriarch in this case?)

Mark replies:

Indeed, Jennifer. Her (held in abeyance) Royal Highness has a bad case of imagined victimhood. One of the few benefits of Covid-19 is that it's pushed Look-at-Me Meghan out of the news - until, that is, she gets it.

Walt Trimmer • Mar 12, 2020 at 12:41

I've been trying to write, "Wipe that smile off your face, or else," in iambic pentameter, but alas, no luck.

John Wheeler • Mar 9, 2020 at 19:13

Membership was a Christmas gift to my wife that I renew each year, and I would do do solely for the Sunday poem.
Since you are taking suggestions for future poems I suggest "Out, out" by Robert Frost.

Mark replies:

Hard to argue with that, John, as he's a kind of neighbor of mine over in Franconia, New Hampshire.

John Wheeler

John Wheeler • Mar 9, 2020 at 20:29

And he's the former Poet Laureate of Vermont, I might add.

Back at ya, Tennyson!

Nicholas Strathy • Mar 9, 2020 at 16:49

Odds that I would ever have heard of this poem if not for the MSC: zero. You probably have heard the old joke: last year I couldn't even spell enginear but now I are one.

I see Margaret Atwood weighed in with a book on the subject at some point so it is evidently on the feminist radar, and not without reason obviously.

I think there has been progress in the west since the Italian renaissance on the rights of women. No doubt many 16th century contemporaries would have considered someone like the speaker in the poem to be a man who was "righteous in his time" ie the age of Machiavelli, but over the centuries our collective sense of right and wrong has grown more refined.

Nowadays, everyone, particularly the woke individual, is an expert on morality, though very few choose to aim for the Christian standard which is higher but vastly more forgiving than the woke one. Human nature remains unchanged but Christian notions of right and wrong have permeated the culture to the extent that even casting couch victims can confront vicious powerful men and stand a chance of coming away somewhat satisfied with jusice.

Walt Trimmer

Nicholas Strathy • Mar 10, 2020 at 16:51

Today's morality is based on 20th Century Existentialism (now referred to as Post-Modernism) that there is no right or wrong but humans define their own meaning in life and make rational decisions despite existing in an irrational universe. This philosophy gives you a lot of latitude and lets you resent people who make judgments on your behavior.

Nicholas Strathy

Walt Trimmer • Mar 10, 2020 at 20:45

Quite. Beyond good and evil and all that rot. What is truth? and all that equivocating sophistry. Morality was tried and found problematic therefore hey whatever - with some exceptions, namely, racists are evil, climate deniers are evil, closed borders are evil. Or consult the latest woke trend which represents the finger-point du jour to avoid the unpleasant task of addressing our own evil.

Fran Lavery • Mar 8, 2020 at 21:34

Disturbing and creepy! The idea of young women as objects to be discarded casually wasn't so long ago in the vast scheme of history of the wealthy and privileged. Why, just the other day Bill Clinton talking in a television interview about how Monica Lewinsky was a way to relieve his anxiety during some tense period in his life.

Marc Swerdloff • Mar 8, 2020 at 20:11

Chilling in iambic pentameter.

Todd Lewis • Mar 8, 2020 at 17:35

Forgive me, I am admittedly a bourgeois naif. All I know about royalty is mainly from the tabloid covers in the grocery checkout. Mark, you frequently defend the benefits of hereditary monarchy as if there were some hidden guardrails on the characters of royals based on their awareness of having won the genetic lottery. I've never understood that and certainly have no experience to inform me. Yet, here we have a tale of boundless arrogance and cold-blooded barbarism masquerading as nobility. What did I miss? Am I way too literal and this only about artistic technique? Can you see my confusion?

Nicola Timmerman

Todd Lewis • Mar 8, 2020 at 18:35

A lot of aristocrats (at least they used to) feel that with great privilege comes great responsiblity (sounds like Spiderman).
But this is a strange choice of poem for International Women's Day unless it is to show how women down through the ages rarely had any power and were possessions. The Duke reminds me of Henry the VIII who kept getting rid of his wives (even though it was his fault they didn't produce the heir he wanted).

Dave A • Mar 8, 2020 at 13:30

My favorite line from the poem:

"E'en then there would be some stooping, and I choose
Never to stoop."

I like to use it in conversation but it's surprising how seldom the opportunity arises.

Terry Fredricks • Mar 8, 2020 at 12:57

Very instructive! I loved the commentary.

Mark replies:

Thanks, Terry. Glad you enjoyed it.

Rosalind Haddon • Mar 8, 2020 at 12:53

Thanks Mark! A wonderful reading and analysis. Thoroughly enjoyed it!

Mark replies:

Thank you, Rosalind. Very kind of you.

Kathy Shaidle • Mar 8, 2020 at 12:12

This is the poem we read in high school that made me want to write poetry.

Sue Sims

Kathy Shaidle • Mar 8, 2020 at 12:37

I've taught it many times for GCSE English Literature (for you US types, GCSE is the exam our students take when they're 16, in a range of subjects). Of all the poems I've taught, this one fascinates and horrifies the students most of all, particularly when they realise that the narrator and his 'last duchess' were real people (though there's no hard evidence that the duke did in fact have his wife murdered).