Jealousy and obsessive love is a theme in Porphyria’s Lover and the Duchess of Malfi. Analyse the poem closely making appropriate links to the Duchess Of Malfi.
The theme of jealousy and obsessive love naturally becomes apparent through the opening lines of the poem, as Browning uses the pathetic fallacy of the ‘wind’ which ‘tore the elm-tops down for spite’ to personify human jealousy. The verbs associated with the ‘wind’ are ‘awake’, ‘tore’, and ‘vex’, as Browning juxtaposes nature with human qualities to show how they are similar – they are both capable of becoming destructive over what they possess. The wind destroys the ‘elm-tops’, but Porphyria’s lover goes to the extent of murder. This is enhanced by the deliberate emotional breakthrough that Browning makes in his dramatic monologue, when he describes how he ‘listened with heart fir to break’. The effectiveness of the dramatic monologue is that Browning unknowingly reveals things about himself and at this particular point he has expressed how he is emotionally unstable. The ‘heart’ has connotations of love and warmth but Browning paradoxically associated negative feelings such as to ‘break’, to express his incompleteness and sadness. Moreover the verb ‘break’ is deliberately end-stopped to reveal the intensity of his feelings and the obsessive nature of his love for Porphyria.