She is a prisoner who is starved for real life, and stifles; the fresh air and the open sky are good, are irresistible--and that is the whole long poem in brief.

Such a small prisoner, all life and fire, was before many months actually delivered from her cage in Wimpole Street, and Robert Browning himself, growing in stature amid his incantations, played the part of the gipsy.
Another Duchess, who pined for freedom and never attained it, has her cold obituary notice from her bereaved Duke's lips in the _Dramatic Lyrics_ of 1842.

_My Last Duchess_ was there made a companion poem to _Count Gismond_; they are the pictures of the bond-woman and of the freed-woman in marriage.

The Italian Duchess revolts from the law of wifehood no further than a misplaced smile or a faint half-flush, betraying her inward breathings and beamings of the spirit; the noose of the ducal proprieties is around her throat, and when it tightens "then all smiles stopped together." Never was an agony hinted with more gentlemanly reserve.

But the poem is remarkable chiefly as gathering up into a typical representative a whole phase of civilisation.