An analysis of Robert Browning’s Monologue
“Porphyria’s Lover” Overview of “Porphyria’s Lover”
“Porphyria’s Lover,” which first appeared in 1836, is one of the earliest and most shocking
of Browning’s dramatic monologues (or poems in the form of a speech or narrative by a
speaker, in which the speaker inadvertently reveals aspects of his or her character while
describing a particular situation or series of events). The speaker lives in a cottage in the countryside. His lover, a beautiful young l
ady with blue
eyes and blond hair named Porphyria, comes in out of a storm and proceeds to make a fire
to warm the cottage. She embraces the speaker, offering him her
bare shoulder. He tells us that he does not speak to her,
but she is “murmuring how she loved” him but is “Too weak” to set her “passion
free/ From pride” and to “dissever” “vainer ties,” or that she is too weak
(perhaps emotionally) to give into her passions and have a lasting relationship with him. He adds, however, that “passion
sometimes
would prevail.” He looks up at her eyes which he describes
as “Happy and proud” and realizes that she “worship[s]” him. Realizing that she will eventually give in
to society’s pressures by not having a relationship with him and wanting to preserve the moment,
he wraps her hair around her neck three times and strangles her. He opens her eyes, and it is unclear if she
is dead yet, and he says her eyes “Laughed” “without a stain” and then he “untightened”
her hair around her neck, which
makes her face seem to blush bright beneath his “burning
kiss,” and he then props her head against his cheek (notice the reversal in his cheek
being against her before and now hers is against his). He describes her as having a “smiling rosy
little head,/ So glad it has its utmost will” and that all “it scorned at once is fled”
and he “has gained “its love” instead. He goes on to say that Porphyria had not guessed
how her “darling one wish would be heard.” He sits with her body this way the entir
e
night, remarking that God has not yet moved to punish him. Analysis of “Porphyria’s Lover”
By telling the disturbing event that occurs in this narrative poem through the perspective
of Porphyria’s lover rather than through her perspective is significant because we
see only his version of her feelings and his justification for murdering her through strangulation. We are left to guess his motivation or why
he has done such a horrific deed. The poem only gives a few details to leave
the reader to
try to interpret the situation and the psychology behind the speaker’s
actions. What we do know is what Porphyria looks like
and wears, a dripping cloak and shawl” and “soiled gloves,” which may suggest she
is not poor. We also know she came to him and seems to
hold the power in the relationship, at least until she is strangled by her lover, since
she came to him, makes the fire, bares her shoulder to him, and puts his hand around
her waist. We are not sure what makes her pale or too
weak to se
t her passions free from pride and cut what he calls vain ties. Perhaps she is married to another or of a
higher social class that does not allow her to commit herself to a relationship with the
speaker. We know their relationship has been going
on for a while since he says that sometimes passion prevails between them. Notice the shift in power, perhaps indicating
that the speaker has taken power from her that he did not have up to this point. He looks up into her eyes, which are described
as pr
oud (perhaps again a suggestion of her social status). He is the one who says she worshiped him,
but he says this revelation surprises him, indicating that it may or may not have been
true in the past or at all and is just in his mind. He also says that she is “pure and good”
only in that moment, as if she is not always pure and good. Her impurity in his perspective could mean
she does not love him fully or is not married to him or even is married to another. The reader must guess. After she is
strangled, we don’t know if
her wish, which he suggests is to die in his arms, is in fact her wish, but since he has
taken her life, the speaker now holds all of the power in the relationship. Porphyria, whom he is now using the pronoun
“it” to refer to has been reduced to, an item in her lover’s arms. She is given no voice in this poem, and we
are left to hear only her murderer’s voice and guess how she has felt about the relationship. The speaker ends the poem with “And yet
God has not said a
word!” suggesting that since God has not intervened
and has allowed this to happen, that God approves of what the speaker has done, which, of course,
could be the speaker’s psychotic justification for taking Porphyria’s life. Context of “Porphyria’s Lover”
For the Victorians, modernity meant an insensitivity to problems of urban life, with its constant
overstimulation and newspapers full of scandalous and horrifying stories that numbed people
to shock. Many believed that the onslaught of amorali
ty
and the constant assault on the senses could be counteracted only with an even greater
shock. This is the principle Browning adheres to
in “Porphyria’s Lover.” Browning uses shock to break through his readers’
probable complacency by having Porphyria’s lover murder her, and thus he provokes some
moral or emotional reaction in his presumably numb audience. Browning is not necessarily trying to shock
readers into condemning either Porphyria or the speaker for their sexuality; rather, he
seeks t
o remind us of the disturbed condition of the modern psyche by giving us a glimpse
into a murderer’s mind. In fact, “Porphyria’s Lover” was first
published, along with another poem, under the title Madhouse Cells, exploring the psychology
of a psychotic person. Like many Victorian writers, Browning was
also trying to explore the boundaries of sensuality in his work. Browning also questions the Victorian condemnation
of human sexuality in a society that had one of the highest rates of prostitutio
n in history,
as well as wide scale poverty, pollution, crime, colonization and other horrors. By having Porphyria’s lover murder her as
a means of keeping her, it seems to minimize the crime of illicit sex outside of wedlock
or perhaps adultery. Form of “Porphyria’s Lover”
“Porphyria’s Lover” does not display the colloquialisms of some of Browning’s
later poems. While the cadence of the poem mimics natural
speech, it actually takes the form of highly patterned verse, rhyming ABABB. The intensit
y and asymmetry of the pattern
suggests the madness concealed within the speaker’s controlled speech and reasoned
justification of the murder of his lover that evening, whom he is still holding dead in
his arms.
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