Furthermore when the lover kills her, he sits with her and kisses her over, leaving a ‘blush’ on her cheeks. However once the woman is dead how could she blush? The lover wants to show that Porphyria loves him back as well. As Porphyria is dead, her head falls into the lover’s shoulders. This position is how they stay for the rest of the poem and night. The lover also feels his action of killing Porphyria are justified, because she belongs to him and that he is very possessive hence she should only love him and that god has not questioned his doing or actions;
‘And yet God has not said a word!’
The poem ‘My Last Duchess’ is similar to ‘Porphyrias Lover’ as it is also a narrative and a dramatic monologue poem. This poem is about a Duke who marries woman, he then gets them painted and them has them killed. The poem is about his last Duchess. It starts off with the Duke talking about her painting on the wall, painted by Fra Pandolf. The audience is then asked by the Duke to look and admire her;
‘Looking as if she were alive…That piece of wonder…Will’t please you sit and look at her?’
The reader realises that the Duchess is not alive but is dead;
‘Looking as if she were alive’.
The Duke then talks about the Duchess flirting with every man, such as when Fra Pandolf told her to pull her blouse up her wrist a little, in which she blushed;
‘Half flush that dies along her throat’
The painting may not have her blushing on it, because the Duke wants to portray the Duchess as having treated every man the same as him. It may also mean that the Duke is psychotic, seeing thing which are not there. The Duke states that a man gave a bough of cherries to his last Duchess, which can be seen as a sexual symbol;
‘The bough of cherries some officious fool’
The Duke states that she treated every man the same, and that the title of Duchess was the same to her as any gift from other men;
‘-as if she ranked
My gift of a nine hundred year old name
With anybody’s gift.’
The Dukes justification for killing the Duchess is because she didn’t treat him, her husband, differently from the rest of the men. This shows how jealous the Duke is of the Duchess liking other men. The Duke therefore gets her killed. He then comes back from his story and says that there is a Counts daughter waiting for him.
The Duke will probably marry her, have a panting taken of her and then have her killed, similar to his previous Duchess. The poem ends with him describing a statue of Neptune taming a sea horse, which was sculpted by the sculptor, Claus of Innsbruck, for him. The Duke sees himself as Neptune the master of the sea-horses and hence is wives to be the sea-horses, the slaves or always below him in the hierarchy;
‘Notice Neptune though,
Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!’
Both the poems are very similar because they are both about men who are psychotic and who have killed women. Not any women but women they know i.e. their lovers. However, both the poems are different due to the fact that the murderers had different motives that resulted in the deaths of the two women. The lover murdered Porphyria because he wanted her to himself and for her to only love him. The Duke gets his Duchess killed because he is jealous that she treats all men the same and wants to punish her;
‘This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together.’
However, the Duke gets all his wives murdered, so there is a possibility that he is delusional and psychotic. This may prove that he was making up everything about his wife treating all men the same, because he could have just wanted a simple reason to kill her.
The lover is also psychotic because he believes that by killing his love Porphyria, she will only love him and be with him;
‘Porphyria worshipped me…And strangled her.’
Both the male characters from both poems are psychotic, because of them the women die. However, the way that the women are killed and the reason they are killed are different.
‘Porphyrias Lover’ and ‘My Last Duchess’ are also very ironic. In the poem ‘Porphyrias Lover’, the lover kills Porphyria, yet still he has love for her;
‘And strangled her…And I, its love, am gained instead!’
This is very ironic because people do not kill the people they love. This adds to the fact that the lover as being psychotic, because he kills the ones he loves. Similarly in the poem ‘My Last Duchess’ there is also irony;
‘Will’t please you sit and look at her…and her looks went everywhere’
The irony is shown by the fact that the Duke doesn’t like it when the Duchess was alive and everyone was looking at her, but after her death he wants everyone to see her beauty in the picture. This is evidence of psychotic behaviour, as he wants his wife to be killed because men are looking at her too much, however then somehow wants men to look at her after she is dead.
Both the poems are ironic in different ways. ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ is ironic because the lover kills the one he loves, and ‘My Last Duchess’ is ironic because the Duke wants men to look at a picture of the Duchess after her death even though he didn’t like men looking at her when she was alive.
Both the poems ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ and ‘My Last Duchess’ are similar because they are both dramatic monologues and are narrative poems, which have been written for an audience. Also, both of the characters lack emotion when their loved ones die. This may be because both the characters are psychotic. In ‘Porphyria’s Lover’, the killing is very direct;
‘In one yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around,
And strangled her. No pain felt she;
I am quite sure she felt no pain.’
In this the Lover shows no emotion or remorse of the murdering of his love, Porphyria, however the lover does show emotion nearer to the killing;
‘Made my heart swell’.
This is psychotic because he shows emotion when he thinks about killing her, but does not show any emotion what so ever when he is committing the murder. The lover is also an articulate speaker. He has a rhyming scheme of ABABB every five stanza;
‘…to-night…awake…vex…spite…lake…break’
The lover used words such as "vex" and "spite" to give a picture of the way he felt, a picture of his emotions. The lover had also used figurative language to create imagery;
‘The sullen wind was soon awake…In one yellow string I wound…As a shut bud that holds a bee’
‘The sullen wind was soon awake,’ is an example of personification and it also creates imagery that the wind suddenly changes from a gale to a breeze. ‘In one yellow string I wound’, is a metaphor as it creates a picture of the lover taking Porphyria’s hair in one lock and strangling her with it. ‘As a shut bud that holds a bee,’ is a simile and it creates the imagery of how Porphyria’s eyes were shut tight. ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ is a figurative poem, containing all the three types of figurative language- similes, metaphors and personification. This poem successfully creates imagery using figurative language and also proves that the lover is either an articulate speaker or writer.
In the poem ‘My Last Duchess’, the Duke does show some emotions while talking about the Duchess flirting with other men, but he shows no emotion when he talks about the Duchess getting murdered;
‘The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broke in the orchard for her…
…I gave commands
Then all smiles stopped together’
The passage shown portrays the jealousy that had overcome the Duke, and the fact that he would rather kill the Duchess than let other men see her. However, it is ironic that he wants men to look at her beauty after she had died;
‘Will’t please you sit and look at her?’
This shows the Duke to be psychotic and furthermore he may have been looking for a scapegoat to purposefully get the Duchess killed, because he has got all his previous wives killed by marrying them, then painting them and then killing them. This emphasis the fact that he is psychotic and more so very arrogant;
‘And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst’,
This means that ‘if they dared ask me’. The Dukes arrogance has made him a psychotic, because he believes that his title as Duke has the most authority and is all-powerful like God;
‘-as if she ranked
My gift of a nine hundred year old name
With anybody’s gift.’
Furthermore, the Duke also includes symbols to create imagery in the poem;
‘Notice Neptune though,
Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!
However, the Duke is not an articulate speaker in the poem;
‘Even had you skill
In speech-(which I have not)’
In the poem the Duke is not a very articulate speaker and he thereby uses symbols and imagery to help him convey his messages. And example of this is where he is Neptune and he is controlling his wives, the seahorses. By contrast, the articulate lover uses figurative language. The dramatic monologue used by the Duke has enjambment, establishing that he is inarticulate. Although, every two lines in his dramatic monologue rhymes, suggesting that he is quite articulate.
‘Porphyria’s Lover’ and ‘My Last Duchess’ are both similar because they are dramatic monologues and are narrative poems, which have been written to be heard. Also, both of narrators of the poems lack emotions and feelings when their loved ones die. Furthermore, both poems create visual imagery to help convey the meanings. However, ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ uses figurative language to create imagery while ‘My Last Duchess’ uses symbols to create imagery.
Robert Browning’s poems, ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ and ‘My Last Duchess’, are both similar yet different in their own ways that have been established in this essay. The story, structure, use of language and the characters all compare and contrast. Both poems show different points of view. In ‘Porphyrias Lover’ it is of a man and a woman committing adultery. Also the poem ‘My Last Duchess’ is of a man whose wife is committing adultery. Both poems show different emotions and feelings towards their loved ones and also the different ways different people convey them.