Analyse the Different Forms of Power Presented in "My Last Duchess", "A Woman to Her Lover" and "La Belle Dame Sans Merci"

Amongst the three love poems examined in this essay, the theme of male or female power in relationships pervades throughout. The views of the speakers are expressed and defined through literary and poetic techniques. This gives the reader an insight into the speaker's problems and dissatisfaction of a relationship, due to an imbalance of power. However there are dissimilarities between the poems - for example where in "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" the female displays …

…Browning depicts them as inferior to men, Walsh seeks to show the competence of women while the woman in Keats' poem possesses supernatural powers. The main thing that the three poems teach us is that the role of the sexes in a relationship can change, depending on the type and amount of power they posses - the male can be the one who is trapped and exploited while the women emerges as the dominant one.