Compare Browning's "My Last Duchess" and Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

Browning's "My Last Duchess" and Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" are similar in both presenting unmarried, middle-aged men suffering from insecurity as they explain their actions to a third party. However, they differ greatly elsewhere.

The narrator of Browning's poem is an aristocrat with "a nine hundred year old name," arrogant and haughty. His insecurity shows in his loquacity. At first, he seems merely prissy and insufferable. Later, as it becomes clear that he has had his former wife executed for real or imagined flirting of the most harmless nature ("then all smiles stopped together"), he becomes a textbook example of what has been called "the banality of evil," with his offhand admission followed quickly by talk of another marriage.

The narrator of "Prufrock" lives at a middle level and has wasted much of his life in pointless socializing, "measured out my life with coffee spoons." Instead of evil potency, he admits "am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.... almost, at times, the Fool." He can catch a glimpse of ideals, "have seen them riding on the waves," but this only accentuates his feelings of uselessness.

The shared theme would seem to be the need for both self-awareness and action. The duke, who can act, is sunk in a lethal and banal shallowness; Prufrock, who is capable of sustained reflection, is paralyzed when it comes to action.