Porphyria's Lover

Hardy initially uses similes to illustrate the bleak landscape, referring to the “sun [as] white” and leaves as “grey”, to emphasise his sorrowful opinion of love. Specific diction of bleak words strongly communicates his message of love being hopeless and sorrowful. He also uses personification of “starving sod”, to allude that the earth is frozen and desiring nutrients which it lacks. This creates an undesirable setting and mood of despair and sorrow expressing how he perceives love. In contrast, Browning orientates an inviting, cheerful setting through the use of similes. The scene is vibrant with “little waves that leap” and “warm sea-scented beach[es]”, allowing the reader to perceive it as joyful. This illustrates how he regards love as an uplifting experience, which brings people together. He structures his poem with no stanzas, allowing for the reader to follow the radiant journey of love. In contrast, Hardy includes stanzas allowing him to express his message though new topics. They consist of the bleak setting, his former partners eyes, her bitter smile and his message of how all love disappoints. He includes an enclosed rhyme scheme, presenting the entrapment of love, expressing no freedom and joy in relationships. In opposition, Browning uses anaphora of “and” to express how the speaker’s mind is not in the moment, looking ahead to the future where they reunite with their lover. It is evident that Hardy conveys his message of love as sorrowful and full of despair, in contrast Browning message reveals love as gracious and

The loss of a loved one is perhaps the most difficult experience that humans ever come up against. The poem Porphyria’s Lover, written by Robert Browning, adds a sense of irony to this. At the most superficial layer, the speaker’s in both Porphyria’s Lover and Neutral Tones, written by Thomas hardy, both deal with loss. The tones in Neutral Tones seem to be indifferent, or Neutral. Porphyria’s Lover speaker ends up murdering his beloved at the end the poem. While this isn’t the case with the speaker in Neutral Tones, the two speakers are much more similar than we might think. The speaker in Neutral Tones doesn’t outright murder his lover, but there is a considerable amount of disdain and contempt towards his supposed lover. The speaker in Porphyria’s Lover is quite obviously a disturbed man, the sinister nature of the speaker in Neutral Tones, however, is not as clear. Delving further into this idea, I will also discuss other obscure parallels throughout the two poems.

Robert Browning uses descriptive details to portray a theme of how darkness rises from warmth and happiness by showing us on how a man’s love for someone makes him turn to savagery. The narrator of the poem has very deep feelings for his lover, but he only thinks of himself and he never wants the girl to leave his side so he does the unthinkable. In the times that the girl was not home or was not with the narrator then there was coldness and darkness, but when she was with the man then the house would “blaze up, and all the cottage warm”. She created hope and the narrator needed that constantly, so he realized that his love was too strong to put on hold everyday when she would leave. The fact that the narrator had to watch his lover leave everyday

However, the poem has fluidity despite its apparent scarcity of rhyme. After examining the alteration of syllables in each line, a pattern is revealed in this poem concerning darkness. The first nine lines alternate between 8 and 6 syllables. These lines are concerned, as any narrative is, with exposition. These lines set up darkness as an internal conflict to come. The conflict intensifies in lines 10 and 11 as we are bombarded by an explosion of 8 syllables in each line. These lines present the conflict within one's own mind at its most desperate. After this climax, the syllables in the last nine lines resolve the conflict presented. In these lines, Dickinson presents us with an archetypal figure that is faced with a conflict: the “bravest” hero. These lines present the resolution in lines that alternate between 6 and 7 syllables. Just as the syllables decrease, the falling action presents us with a final insight. This insight discusses how darkness is an insurmountable entity that, like the hero, we must face to continue “straight” through “Life” (line 20).

Browning uses diction describing porphyria as angelic to stress her majestic qualities to the reader. She is capable of making “all the cottage warm” and can prevent any “cold” or “storm” from coming in. She has nice cloths, long golden hair, a white shoulder and white skin. She is clearly

Porphyria’s Lover and The Laboratory “Porphyria’s Lover” and “The Laboratory” both deal with crimes of passion. Explore ways Browning explains ways of obsessive nature of his character and analysis the effects of literary techniques. “Porphyria’s Lover” is a poem about a crime and passion. Porphyria is a young, wealthy girl who seems to have abandoned her family’s tradition of choosing wealthy men as lovers. Her lover remains anonymous, this could be because he has murdered her and does not want his name releasing.

look at but he feels as if the Duchess takes him for granted and she

Most poets use their unique gift of writing poetry to relieve stress or just to document their emotions towards a given subject. Others use it as a key to bring about social change and voice their opinion on modern events. This is the case in Stephen Crane’s War Is Kind. The speaker in the poem uses irony as a strategy to convince the reader of the harsh reality of war.

It seemed as though he preferred to write from the perspective of psychopaths and murderers, and that contributed to the label he was given as a writer of dramatic monologues. Porphyria’s Lover best illustrates his use of madness. Not only is the main character murdered, as death is definitely a consistent theme in his work, but it shows the scary desire of the killer and essentially makes use of the saying “if I can’t have her, no one can.” As he kills her the speaker’s voice shifts to a rhythmical description of his crime, “one long yellow string I wound, three times her little throat around.” Also, this work is written in Petrarchan styling, meaning ABABB, which gives it the consistently over the top word choice to illustrate the speaker’s madness. My Last Duchess also follows a similar pattern, but instead it is a royal duke that sentences his wife, the duchess, to death for merely having a friendly disposition. The duke detailed his observations that she was, “Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er she looked on, and her looks went everywhere.” His jealousy of her shared attention came from a place of insanity, as no sane man kills his love over a

In Robert Browning's dramatic monologue, "Porphyria's Lover," the love-stricken frustrations of a nameless speaker end in a passionate, annihilating response to society's scrutiny towards human sensuality. Cleverly juxtaposing Porphyria's innocent femininity and her sexual transgression, Browning succeeds in displaying society's contradictory embrace of morality next to its rejection of sensual pleasure. In an ironically tranquil domestic setting, warm comfort and affection come to reveal burning emotional perversions within confining social structures. The speaker's violent display of passion ends not with external condemnation, but with the matter-of-fact sense of

Nevertheless, it is the only poem on the list containing dramatic irony. The title alone is misleading, as the poem is not about Porphyria’s lover, rather her murderer. The speaker is completely unaware that he has done something wrong, proclaiming in line 42, after strangling her, “I am quite sure she felt no pain.” He believes he made her happy, and that her love is his forever, whereas the readers know that he is insane and that he has just murdered this woman. There is a sort of detached madness in his belief that he has won her ultimate

The two Browning poems, ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ and ‘My Last Duchess’ were written to convey to the reader how women were treated in that era; as possession, as assets. Both of these poems can be read from different points of view and they also both are what is

Both of these works contain the unique ability, as portrayed by Browning, to create a deep fictional psyche that displays the strange relationship between man and woman. This relationship is displayed as one full of pain, jealousy, rejection and happiness, the majority of these emotion are contained in love and marriage. From this the reader can infer the nature of love being the conquering of class distinction and marriage involves sexist male inhibitions. Insecurities are seen in both poems and are evident in the perspective voices of the male protagonists, who are seen as incapable to handle their aggressive and possessive natures when it comes to love and marriage. Browning seems to be demonstrating the side of relationships avoided previously by Romantics and in doing so shows the negative implication on seemingly unruly

By popular thinking of that day, disorientating violence exacted on the community can only be dealt with through an equal and opposite reaction of violence toward the exacter. An old saying throughout Europe goes ‘Do not hunt monsters, lest you wish to become one yourself.’ Yet, his order and disorder themes lend greatly to the senses of symbolism in the story.

The title ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ may indicate to the reader the idea that the lover would be the only active article in the poem, especially if it was written by a male during those times. However, at the beginning of the poem Porphyria is immediately given the active role, she’s the one who “glided in” wanting to visit him “for love of her…/ through wind and rain”, she also “shut the out cold and storm”. This gives Porphyria a masculine physical ability as she has the power to “shut…out” something as sinewy as a storm, which goes against the female stereotype.