My Last Duchess by Robert Browning (1842)

The Duke of Ferrara draws a curtain back to show a stranger the portrait of his dead wife, and the polished courtesy of his voice never once falters as he explains, by degrees, why she had to die. She smiled too readily, he complains: a sunset, a bough of cherries someone broke for her in the orchard, his own nine-hundred-years-old name, every kindness earned the same warm look, and he would not stoop to ask her to ration it. So he gave commands, and then all smiles stopped together. Browning hands you one long unbroken speech and lets the speaker damn himself inside his own good manners, each silky aside a confession he has no idea he is making. The horror of _My Last Duchess_ is not the murder but the poise: a connoisseur already appraising his next bride while a bronze Neptune tames a sea-horse on the wall, the dead woman smiling now for no one but him, and only when he chooses to draw the curtain.