Compare The ways In Which Tennyson And Browning Present The Theme Of Love In Their Poems And The Way They Suggest About Victorian Cultural and Social Values.

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James O’Brien                                                                        1/3/03

Compare The ways In Which Tennyson And Browning Present The Theme Of Love In Their Poems And The Way They Suggest About Victorian Cultural and Social Values.

        The poems “The Sisters” by Lord Alfred Tennyson and “Porphyria’s Lover” by Robert Browning involve the themes of love, madness, obsession and jealousy. The poems were written in the Victorian era and are both dramatic monologues, which are poems written in the first person and are dramatic in content for example a murder and suicide. As these are both written in the 1st person, “The Sisters” is narrated by a sister and “Porphyria’s lover” is narrated by the lover.  

        

One theme in the two poems is jealousy. In “Porphyria’s Lover” the lover is jealous because he cannot have Porphyria to himself; this drives him to kill Porphyria. This is similar in “The Sisters” where one sister is jealous of the other because she is more beautiful and an Earl fell in love with her; the sister died and the jealous sister thought she went to hell. Towards the end of the poem, the sister invites the Earl around for dinner and she sleeps with him, in the middle of the night she woke up and stabbed the Earl to death.  If we look at Victorian social ideas, young women were not to go out without a chaperone and clearly Porphyria went to her lover’s house without one, young women should have never betrayed another lover which happens in the poem. Porphyria tells the lover that she has ties, but he doesn’t agree with, “From pride, and vainer ties dissever.” In “The Sisters” the jealous sister sleeps with the Earl before marriage, this was classed as a major sin in the Victorian period, she would also lose her honour and any hope of getting married.

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Another theme in both poems is madness/confusion; in “The Sisters” one sister is very jealousy so jealous that she is mad and it drives her to kill the Earl, the madness and jealousy is shown in a refrain, “The wind is blowing in turret and tree,” the word ‘blowing’ changes to ‘howling’, then to ‘roaring’, to ‘raging’ and finally to ‘raving’. The verb indicating the movement of the wind makes it fiercer and stronger as the poem progresses, which symbolises that her jealousy and madness becomes stronger and fiercer each time. Once the sister kills the Earl the verb returns to ...

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