Power & Conflict poetry comparison

Both Shelley's ‘Ozymandias’ and Browning's ‘My Last Duchess’ present rulers whose power rests on pride and control, and both use art – a statue and a portrait – to expose them. However, while Shelley shows human power destroyed by time, Browning shows a power that remains chillingly intact¹, revealed only by the ruler's own voice. Together they suggest that the effect of absolute power is to dehumanise both the powerful and those they control.

Shelley presents power as something that inevitably decays. The statue is ‘trunkless’ and its face a ‘shattered visage’, ‘Half sunk’ in the sand; the broken body becomes a metaphor for broken authority. Yet the ruler's expression survives: the ‘frown, / And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command’. The curled-lip disdain of ‘sneer’ and the hard alliteration of ‘cold command’ show a tyrant who ruled through contempt. Browning's Duke is more subtle but just as cold. He seems courteous, yet his casual statement ‘I gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together’ implies he had his wife killed. The euphemism makes the effect more disturbing than any open threat: power allows him to describe murder as administration. Both poets therefore show² that power breeds a frightening indifference to other people.

The poets also differ in how much the ruler controls the poem. Ozymandias is held at three removes³: the speaker meets ‘a traveller’, who describes a statue, which carries an inscription. This framing distances and diminishes him, so that his boast ‘Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ reaches us second-hand and is instantly undercut by the blunt caesura of ‘Nothing beside remains.’ The irony is that the rulers should despair, not at his greatness, but because their own power will also vanish. In contrast, Browning uses a dramatic monologue, so the Duke controls every word. Yet this is his undoing: in trying to impress the envoy, he reveals his jealousy that his wife's ‘looks went everywhere’ and that she ranked his ‘nine-hundred-years-old name’ with ‘anybody's gift’. Shelley undermines power from the outside through framing; Browning lets it condemn itself from the inside⁴.

Form reinforces these effects. ‘Ozymandias’ is a sonnet, a form associated with love, which Shelley uses ironically⁵ for a hymn to a tyrant's ruin. Its rhyme scheme is irregular, mixing Petrarchan and Shakespearean patterns, as if order itself is breaking down, much like the statue. ‘My Last Duchess’ is written in rhyming couplets, suggesting the Duke's control, but the heavy enjambment means the rhymes are barely noticed, hiding his rigid control beneath apparently natural conversation – just as his polite manner hides his violence. The Duke even controls who sees his wife's portrait: no one draws the curtain ‘but I’, so his power over her continues after her death.

Contexts sharpen the contrast. Shelley, a Romantic poet and radical who opposed monarchy, published the poem in 1818, during the Regency of the unpopular Prince Regent, and the poem can be read as a warning to all tyrants that the power of nature and time is greater than any king. The final image of ‘The lone and level sands’, with its long vowels and alliteration, stretches the desert out endlessly and leaves nature triumphant. Browning, writing in 1842, set his poem in Renaissance Italy and based the Duke on Alfonso II, Duke of Ferrara⁶; Victorian readers, increasingly uneasy about the treatment of women as property, would recognise the Duke's view of his wife as an object to be collected. Fittingly, the poem ends with him pointing out another artwork, a bronze Neptune ‘Taming a sea-horse’ – a final image of domination.

In conclusion, both poems show power producing arrogance and cruelty, but they end very differently. Shelley offers comfort: tyranny is temporary and the sands will cover it. Browning offers none: the Duke is about to marry again, and his power is still alive in the poem's final lines. The reader is left to judge what Browning's Duke never faces – the consequences.

Blake's ‘London’ and Tennyson's ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ both present ordinary people suffering because of decisions made by those above them, but their attitudes are strikingly different. Blake angrily condemns the institutions responsible, while Tennyson, writing as Poet Laureate, acknowledges the ‘blunder’ yet ultimately turns the soldiers' suffering into glory. Comparing them reveals how a poet's position in relation to power shapes the way suffering is told¹.

Both poems present suffering as widespread and inescapable. Blake's speaker sees ‘Marks of weakness, marks of woe’ in ‘every face’, and the anaphora of ‘every’ in the second stanza – ‘every Man’, ‘every Infants cry’, ‘every voice’ – insists that no one in the city is spared. Tennyson creates the same sense of entrapment through repetition: ‘Cannon to right of them, / Cannon to left of them, / Cannon in front of them’. The structure surrounds the soldiers on the page² just as the guns surround them in the valley. However, Blake's suffering is permanent and everyday, while Tennyson's is a single, dramatic event.

Both poets also identify who holds the power, though with different degrees of criticism. For Blake, the word ‘charter'd’ – applied even to the river Thames – suggests that everything has been owned, mapped and controlled by commercial interests. The ‘mind-forg'd manacles’ show that oppression has become psychological: people are imprisoned by the ideas and laws of those in authority. In the third stanza Blake names the institutions directly. The ‘blackning Church’ is stained by soot and by moral corruption, as it ignores the child chimney-sweepers, while the soldier's ‘sigh’ ‘Runs in blood down Palace walls’, a shocking image that places the blood of wars on the monarchy. Tennyson is far more cautious. He admits ‘Some one had blunder'd’, but the vague pronoun avoids blaming any named commander³, and the soldiers' duty is accepted: ‘Their's not to reason why, / Their's but to do and die’. The anaphora and the rhyme of ‘why’ and ‘die’ make obedience feel inevitable, almost noble.

Form and rhythm reinforce these attitudes. ‘London’ uses a regular ABAB rhyme scheme and four-line stanzas, but this order feels like the ‘charter'd’ streets themselves⁴: rigid and oppressive. Tennyson uses a galloping dactylic rhythm (‘Half a league, half a league’) that imitates the horses' charge and creates excitement. This energy risks glamorising the battle, which fits Tennyson's purpose: he wrote the poem in 1854, shortly after reading a newspaper report of the charge at Balaclava in the Crimean War, and as Poet Laureate he aimed to honour the soldiers⁵ for the nation. Blake, by contrast, wrote outside the establishment; ‘London’ appeared in Songs of Experience (1794), at a time when the French Revolution had made radicals like him deeply suspicious of Church and monarchy.

The endings show the sharpest difference. Blake builds to the oxymoron ‘Marriage hearse’, in which the youthful ‘Harlots curse’ blights even marriage and new life; suffering is passed on to the next generation, and there is no consolation. Tennyson's final stanza asks ‘When can their glory fade?’ and commands the reader to ‘Honour the charge they made!’ The exclamations transform suffering into heroism, and the ‘six hundred’ who rode into ‘the jaws of Death’ become ‘Noble six hundred!’ Yet even Tennyson cannot fully hide the cost⁶: the phrase ‘Left of six hundred’ in the fifth stanza quietly records the losses.

Overall, both poets present ordinary people – workers, children, soldiers – paying the price for the decisions of the powerful. Blake makes this an accusation, using the city as evidence against the institutions that rule it. Tennyson makes it a memorial, honouring the sacrifice while only hinting at the failure that caused it. The contrast shows that the suffering of ordinary people can be used either to challenge power or, more uneasily, to serve it.