Nor loose possession of that faire thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wandr’st in his shade,”
People often feel that their lover’s beauty will go on forever, that they are immortal. Shakespeare though may know she has heard this before and so proves it in his last three lines:
When in eternall lines to time thou grow’st,
So long as men can breath or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
As long as the poem exists that person’s beauty lives on. Shakespeare has proved that this person’s beauty can last forever. After almost four hundred years. The poem is also effective as the love does not seem awkward like found in “First Love” by John Clare. Awkwardness is often felt in a first love and as Shakespeare does not show this we can presume that it is not his first love poem.
Porphyria’s Lover, by Robert Browning is a poem in which a woman named Porphyria is killed by her lover. This man’s obsession with Porphyria led him to murder. Through vocabulary, imagery and situation Browning shows us the mind of an obsessed man. The imagery in this poem helps the reader visualize the surroundings and therefore understand the main events in the poem. The opening lines in the poem show a dark dismal night:
“The rain set early in tonight,
The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
And did its worst to vex the lake:
I listened with heart fit to break.”
This helps the reader think of a dark evening and a man sitting impatiently for his lover. The pathetic fallacy of those first four lines makes us feel that he thinks the outside is deliberately trying to keep Porphyria away. The next few lines:
“When glided in Porphyria; straight
She shut the cold out and the storm,
And kneeled and made the cheerless grate
Blaze up, and all the cottage warm.”
Give us the sense that this woman holds some power over her lover. She seems to take care of him. This sets up a reason why the speaker is obsessed with Porphyria. Dependence is a common feeling associated with love as many people find that they need them to fill holes inside of them.
Porphyria is obviously of a higher rank in society by her use of the words “pride and vanity.” This “rank” gives her obvious power. Porphyria’s power is stopped when she tells him why she came:
“Murmuring how she loved me—she
Too weak, for all her heart’s endeavour
To set it’s struggling passion free
From pride, and vainer ties dissever,
And give herself to me forever.”
This is Porphyria’s weak attempt at breaking-up with the lover. By “murmuring” she loses her pride. You can even imagine that she had come to him from a party when the speaker, later in the poem, says: “tonight’s gay feast.” By breaking-up with him she could possibly enjoy her evening with another man. Lust, a feeling closely linked with love. Porphyria knows that he needs her to care for him but does not want that kind of life anymore. She tries to make this break-up less painful for her lover by saying that she would stay with him if she could, but can’t. She lies to him. People lie a lot when love is involved due to the sensitivity of the issue.
This sounds as though it could be used as a plot for a film in which a woman leaves her lower class boy-friend before, obviously, deciding to return to him after realising what a terrible mistake it was.
“But passion sometimes would prevail,
Nor could tonight’s gay feast restrain
A sudden thought of one so pale
For love of her, and all in vain:
So, she was come through wind and rain
Be sure I looked up at her eyes
Happy and proud; at last I knew
Porphyria worshipped me.”
Passion blinds the speaker to all sense of reality and he starts a chain of thinking that leads him to believe that Porphyria is truly in love with him. He thinks that she came to him to save herself from her destiny and family. “All in vain” shows how the speaker has very little reality left in his mind. Those words show how the speaker is below Porphyria and how his inferiority may lead him to try to be her superior. He loved her to a certain point and past that point she infested his mind. To not have her around him to take care of him was too much for him. The speaker “debated” what to do and realized that she was with him at that moment looking very pretty because she had come from the party and had not left him, yet.
“That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
Perfectly pure and good.”
-He realizes that to keep her he must kill her-
“In one yellow long string I wound three times her little throat around,
And strangled her.”
The speaker’s possessive behaviour over Porphyria is horrifyingly shown. He then projects his feelings on her. He says he is sure that she felt no pain when he knows that he was hurt and in turn he hurt her. The speaker’s need for Porphyria in his life led him to kill her and to have him by her side forever. In a way, the speaker has chosen Porphyria’s path in life; instead of being in high society she can stay with him. The speaker is now Porphyria’s superior.
“. . . Her head, which droops upon it still;
The smiling rosy little head,
So glad it has its utmost will,
That all it scorned at once is fled,
And I, its love, am gained instead!”
In those lines, one can see that the speaker is truly obsessed. In his mind he saved her from her hated society and instead gained him, her love. The last line in the poem, “And yet God has not said a word!” Makes us feel his deeds were not wrong because God had not bothered to strike him dead by lightning making the speaker’s obsession with his love legitimate and valid in the world.
The largest feeling in this poem is obsession and all it’s dreadful results. Murder. We also witness this kind of behaviour in the poem “My Last Duchess” In which a Lord talks about his dead Duchess and how he killed her because, basically, she smiled at other men.
By James Regan 10E
