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In Fraser's Magazine in January 1856 G. Brimley criticised Browning's poetry for containing "odd phrases, startling rhymes, strange arrangements, sudden transitions of thought [and] all kind of eccentricities of style". In contrast George Eliot in the same month saw these factors as strength of Browning's poetry in that there is "no conventionality...but freshness, originality [and] sometimes eccentricity of expression". If these features of Browning's poetry divided his contemporaries then they are also the features which allowed Browning to exploit and challenge the boundaries of the dramatic monologue. But beyond this there is an even greater factor in the success of Browning's dramatic monologue - the use of silence.

In The Poetry of Experience Robert Laugbaum argues that the dramatic monologue is "poetry of sympathy", due to the fact that the reader "must adopt his [the speakers] viewpoint as our entry". If we take this definition to be correct for Browning's monologues it means that the reader is forced to sympathise with characters as repulsive as the Duke in "My Last Duchess" and as deranged as Porphyria's Lover. In placing the reader's entry point to the poem as the speaker's viewpoint Laugbaum effectively ignores the importance of silence in Browning's poetry. In his poetry it is not so much what is said but what isn't and once we recognise this fact it leads the reader straight to an entry point which does not require sympathy - that of the silent interlocutor. From this position we are at once involved in the poem while simultaneously able to analyse the speaker, and not merely accept his (as noticeably all the speakers are male) viewpoint. This entry point does create the question of where the reader's entry point is in those poems which do not have a silent interlocutor, and consequently whether poems such as "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" can be considered to be a dramatic monologue. Whether there is literally a second person present does not actually matter, what is important is that the speaker adopts the argumentative tone shown in "My Last Duchess". In doing this they create a silent interlocutor - their own "second self". In this respect there is no real difference whether the narrator is talking to the absent ("Johannes Agricola in Meditation"), the dead ("Porphyria's lover"), the out of earshot ("Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister") or a Count's envoy. They are all, ultimately, in conflict with their silent selves.

In "My Last Duchess" Browning presents the reader with the amoral Duke, who has probably killed his last wife and is about to marry again for a large dowry. Laugaum sees the Duke to be interesting because of his: "immense attractiveness" rather than because of his "wickedness". This is a rather sadistic view of a man who has probably murdered his wife and requires the reader to put aside their morals when reading the poem. In direct conflict with Laugaum's view it is the immense unattractiveness of the Duke which makes him interesting and we can see his unattractiveness because of our entry point through the count's envoy. Initially the reader does not know that there is a silent interlocutor and this is disorientating for the reader when the Duke directly addresses someone as "you". We are forced to assume that the Duke is talking directly to us, and this view is enhanced by the lack of quotation marks. It is only at the end of the poem that we realise that the Duke is speaking to an envoy rather than directly to us. In this respect the Duke's monologue manipulates our view, but, crucially, not to the extent where we find him attractive and this is due to the second silent presence in the poem - the Duchess. To the Duke she is a possession both literally and metaphorically. She is "my last Duchess", and has been reduced to a painting on a wall, of equal value to a "bronze" Neptune. In this respect she is like the Lucrezia in "Andrea del Sarto". As Isabel Armstrong in Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics notices "when women appear men speak about or to them as a feminine other". As a woman, as a possession, the Duchess has no right to have "joy" in her cheek anymore than she has the right to "smile". The Duke is therefore able to "give commands" so that "all smiles stopped together". He is totally in control, in both his relation with the silent Duchess and the relationship with the silent interlocutor. He asks rhetorical questions: "Who'd stoop to blame/ This sort of trifling?" and never feels the need to justify his reaction to the Duchess, he is simply able to assert that he does not "stoop". After he has dismissed the Duchess's picture he quickly moves on to talk about the other silent woman in the poem - his next wife. He is more interested in the "dowry" which he will gain, with his next Duchess being a new "object" for his collection. The Duke has total control over his silent women, and even persuades the silent envoy to join him but the reader is not under this control. We are sufficiently detached from the poem to be able to judge him - we do not sympathise, we criticise.

In "Porphyria's Lover" Porphyria, like the Duchess, is a silent presence, merely a possession of her unstable lover. The narrator does not share the Duke's "wickedness" he is simply deranged. In this much his language is largely monosyllabic and the rhythm of the poem is in iambic pentameter. In contrast to this, and as an example of the "eccentricity" which Brimley disliked and Eliot admired, the language is parataxic - from "When no voice replied" it is 10 lines before the sentence ends. Added to this Browning ends the lines in a variety of ways. Some are oxytonic: "let her damp hair fall" while some are paroxytonic: "From pride, and vainer ties dissever". This is a speaker who takes no notice of rhyme or rhythm patterns, his own thoughts override all other conventions. For such a speaker however it is the silence in the poem which is important. Indeed there are several allusions to silence - "no voice [replies]" and the final line is "yet God had not said a word". An even greater silence in the poem is that of Porphyria. She "called" the speaker, "murmuring" her love and yet as the reader we do not hear her. It is the narrator who confidently declares that she "worshipped" him and that her heart is "too weak". He takes over her reactions to an even greater extent when he states that "No pain felt she". In a further attempt to deny self to Porphyria she becomes "it", she is no longer a woman, simply a possession of the speaker who can confidently declare that she is "mine". Unlike the Duchess she doesn't even have a picture to declare that she once existed. As Armstrong states "She is literally not there". Porphyria is inexplicably bound to the self of the speaker, as a separate entity she does not exist. She is no more than the product of a deranged mind. This view of love is one which is also reflected by Tennyson in Maud, where Maud cannot come into the garden of the deranged speaker simply because he never really sees her as more than his shadow. In this respect the speaker is not so much the possessor of the silence but is possessed by it. He attempts to exert his control over it by killing Porphyria as part of a sexual fantasy. They still, however, lie together. This inability to separate private silence with public speech means that, in Armstrong's words, the "private takes control of the public to the extent that the public world no longer exists". With this loss of the public there is no moral or social boundaries, murder is now "love", madness is no longer suppressed.

In "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" there is neither a silent interlocutor nor a silent woman - but there is a silent second self. Brimley considered this poem to be "long and highly wrought" while David Mason in The British Quarterly Review thought it to be the "greatest" of the poems in Men and Women. Like Tennyson's "Mariana" (with which it also shares a pervading sense of melancholy) it expands on a line in a play by Shakespeare - in this case from King Lear. It also shares the unheroic reality of the heroic ideal with Tennyson's "Lady of Shalott". This poem, like all of Browning's dramatic monologues, however, is told from a male view point, in this case from the perspective of Roland, whose journey to the dark tower is not one of victory but one of resolution (as is that of Tennyson's Ulysses). Like the images of nature in "Porphyria's Lover" the images of nature in this poem reflect the mental state of the speaker. The landscape is "grey plain all around:/ Nothing but plain to the horizon's bound", a wasteland without hope. Equally the river does not provide cleansing or redemption for him as it is "sluggish" and "spiteful". At the beginning of the poem Roland meets a "hoary cripple", whom he instinctively hates but who is actually a manifestation of his own "malicious eye", his second self. Roland also states that he "lied in every word" and this highlights the issue of how much the reader can trust the speaker of a dramatic monologue. Due to the silence of everyone except the speaker the reader only has the words of the speaker to judge the situation from. Equally we cannot be sure of what the speaker may or may not have done. Is Roland's landscape really so despondent or is he simply projecting his own feelings on to it? Does Porphyria really exist (and what word did the speaker expect from God)? Did the Duke really murder the Duchess? In the case of Roland we are forced to infer that the fact that his search for the Dark Tower has been long and hard, and has ultimately cost him his happiness. He does not care whether he succeeds or fails, lives or dies : "neither pride/ Nor hope rekindling at the end descried / So much as gladness that some might be". For him the only release is to die (like Tithonus in Tennyson's poem) and join "The Band" of knights who have already been defeated by their quest for the Dark Tower. When he does reach the Dark Tower he states that "Burningly it came on me all at once". The use of the word "burningly" suggests the purifying effect of the realisation of his quest, the opportunity for Roland to rise, like the phoenix, from the flames of his former life. Indeed from the flat landscape of the majority of the poem Roland sees "hills" and, unusually for Browning's dramatic monologues, the silence is broken. However this is not the word of God, but the sound of a bell which "knelled the woe of years". Again there is a "flame" but not one of redemption but one of suicide. Roland doesn't have the will to continue, anymore than Ulysses does. Yet Browning doesn't conclusively end the poem with Roland's death, instead the line "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" suggests a return to the beginning of the poem. The reader, and Roland, is trapped in the endless journey without any definite ending. This ambiguity is the silence which pervades all of Browning's dramatic monologues.

In addition to the silent interlocutor, the silent women and the silent self Browning also presents a silent God. In "Porphyria's Lover" "God has not said a word" and Armstrong states that this is because "God has disappeared because he is imaginary". In reality for the speaker neither Porphyria nor God exist, they are merely figments of his deranged and diseased mind. God is also conspicuously absent from "Johannes Agricola in Meditation". Agricola may think that "God's breast" is his "own abode" but God remains silent throughout. The beginning of this poem is similar to Hopkin's "The Starlight Night" but where "the stars!" in Hopkin's poem are part of a na�ve enthusiasm for God, for Browning they are part of egotism, and even madness. Agricola for all his claims of his parity with God has an image of God which is no more real than that of Porphyria's lover. Unlike Tennyson's "St Simeon Stylites" there is no hint of the sexual nature of Agricola's religion. This does not however mean that Agricola is any less deranged. As Armstrong states "God and creation are indistinguishable" and God is therefore silent.