Porphyria’s lover (Robert Browning)

Structure (PL)

• In the form of a dramatic monologue and written by an unreliable narrator

• Satirises the “perfect” Victorian woman

• Suggesting hypocrisy of his readers, outwardly condemning moral deviance, obsessed with controlling “good” at the cost of true morality

• Very sexual, titillating poem that punishes sexual freedom by using violence to preserve her purity

• Regular iambic tetrameter that stays consistent to underline his obsession with control

• ABABB rhyme scheme, like it’s deceptively regular but he can’t let fully go of the rhyme

• First 5 lines are end stopped, but when porphyria comes in, she disrupts the controlled, contained, poetic environment

Context (Browning)

• Married Elizabeth browning

• Alive in Victorian times so competed with scandals for media attention

• All his work was fictional

• Normally described as a psychodrama of selfish love that bordered on insanity

• Believed in many social issues and campaigned through satire and sarcasm

Themes (PL)

• Love (negative)

• Religion

• Obsession

• Insanity

• Death

“And kneeled and made the cheerless grate”

• Submission like societal expectations

• Brings in warmth/ change in tone of poem, speaker and weather

• ”cheerless grate” = metaphor for writer’s hollow feeling with lover”s validation

“Laid her soiled gloves by…let the damp hair fall”

• Ruined/dirty = represents speakers opinion of her

• Character lacks submission to Victorian standards

• Sexually provocative for the time

• → loose hair = immodest and uncontrolled

• Implies trust between characters, foreshadows later death

“That moment she was mine, mine, fair, // perfectly pure and good”

• Fragile sanity = insecure in his ability to keep her

• Repetition = possessive and obsessive

• Plosive alliteration = emphasise her innocence and positivity

• → spitting sound like anger or passion / foreshadows violence

• criticises those who prioritise restrictive ideas about virtue and religion over human life

“In one yellow string I wound // three times her little throat around and strangled her.”

• Dehumanises her by getting rid of human aspects

• Abrupt/sudden = disturbing lack of empathy

• → rhythm and tone remains regular = unaffected by his actions

• Infantilised

• Punished by her own beauty (her hair)

• Enjambement = represents the flowing hair

• Caesura = forces reader to focus on murder

• → end of line mirrors the end of her life

“Blushed bright beneath my burning kiss”

• Alliterative heavy plosive sound = he feels powerful + harsh

• Heightening insanity

• Oxymoronic and warped perception of love

• Sees beauty and affection in moment of death

• ”burning” is normally passionate but made grotesque in association with the corpse

• → has connotations of hell for his sin

• Destructive painful nature of obsession and affection

“So glad it has its upmost will”

• Change in pronouns = detached and dehumanised

• Change to present tense = change in power dynamics as now with dead body “still”

• Casual attitude towards death and sees nothing wrong with his actions

• Warped ideas on how she feels

“Porphyria’s lover”

• Written from an individual perspective, unreliable narrator

• narrator is nameless and reduced to his relationship (sense of self)

• Porphyria is a disease that causes hallucinations so hints at instability

• Shows how self centred the writer is