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Porphyria's Lover

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Porphyria’s Lover is a typical dramatic monologue by Browning, where we get an insight into the narrator’s thoughts. In the poem, we get an insight into the thoughts of a man who kills his love interest out of jealousy: “Nor could to-night’s gay feast restrain.” This gives the impression of Porphyria living a very high status life, just coming from a party, and the narrator being her love interest that she is sneaking away from her life to see. On the other hand, Porphyria’s death could have been provoked by pure psychosis: “I am quite sure she felt no pain.” This is ironic, as the reader knows that Porphyria must have felt pain after being strangled by her own hair, leading the reader to believe that the narrator could be somewhat …show more content…

The poem opens with the setting being described very negatively: “the rain set early in to-night, the sullen wind was soon awake.” This personification of the weather could represent pathetic fallacy as the weather foreshadows the mood and the actions to come. Furthermore on line 6 Porphyria enters and immediately the setting and mood changes to within the cottage: “she shut the cold out and the storm.” This could perhaps represent her warming up the cottage physically by her being in the eye of the narrator but also she attempts to warm up the cottage by lighting the grate on the fire, creating a mellower atmosphere.
The voice in Porphyria’s Lover is a dominant voice, and the reader becomes very involved in the thoughts of the narrator. There is a strange sense of satisfaction in his voice: “and give herself to me forever.” This could be ironic as in the end, she spends her last moments with him, and as he lies with her corpse, she is literally his forever now. However, although the reader could interpret the narrator as being perhaps psychotic, the calmness of his voice from the enjambment does not reflect this, as he describes the actions in a very matter of fact way: “in one long yellow string I wound three times her little throat around”, and “her darling one wish would be heard.” This creepily makes it sound as if he is doing

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