‘Since none puts by
The curtain I have drawn for you, but I’
This shows that he still has control over her even though she has passed on. After that he writes about how every little detail seemed to please her,
‘She had
A heart… how shall I say... too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.’
The Duke gets quite angry at this point,
‘The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broke in the orchard for her,’
This is about how a man broke into the orchard, took a bunch of cherry blossom and gave it to the duchess, and made her very pleased, which as you can understand he can give her far better things than a common man can give,
‘As if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody’s gift.’
He gave her his old and important family name which most women would give their happiness to have, when she married him, which in the Duke’s eyes is better than anything else in the world.
He says that to comment on this behaviour is stooping down to a lower level,
‘And I choose
Never to stoop’
The Duchess’s behaviour becomes beyond tolerable next,
‘Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt,
When’er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together.’
This greatly suggests that the Duke thought he had the power over the Duchess, and used it to order someone to kill her, although he doesn’t directly say but he strongly hints it. But Browning cleverly wrote the poem to show that the Duchess was the one that really had the power, as she drove him mad with anger and jealousy, and used it to control him. But this plan did not work, as her smiling to common men and to peasants only got her killed.
In Porphyria’s lover, the dominant one in the relationship is the female, Porphyria. The poet immediately sets the scene with the first five lines with:
‘The rain set early in to-night
The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
And did its worst to vex the lake’
The narrator of the poem describes his mood the way he describes the weather with words like ‘sullen’, ‘spite’, and ‘vex’. This is a good example of Browning using Pathetic Fallacy.
Then he describes Porphyria gliding in like an angel,
‘Then glided in Porphyria; straight,
She shut the cold out and the storm,
And kneeled up and made the cheerless grate
Blaze up, and all the cottage warm;’
This is symbolising how the narrator has been sitting alone in the dark feeling sad about not being with Porphyria.
Then Browning talks about how Porphyria puts her arms around him and how she whispers how she loves him and wants to be with him.
‘Happy and proud; at last I knew,
Porphyria worshipped me;’
Then he thinks for a while and then decides what to do. After a while he decides to kill her.
I think Browning wrote for the narrator to kill Porphyria because at that moment she loved him and wanted to be with him for the rest of her life.
But this would mean giving up her class, her money and her family were most likely to disown her, so he killed her so she would not change her mind.
At the end of the poem Browning writes how the narrator expects to be punished,
‘And yet God has not said a word’
I think these poems are cleverly written by Browning to show power and love, and how the men in the two poems think they have the power but really they do not.