When Porphyria enters the room, the mood changes at once. Whereas at the start of the poem, you feel like the shades are cold - blues and greys. The poet uses words such as “sullen”, “spite”, and “vex” to indicate human emotions. As soon as Porphyria enters, the warmth livens the room - the shades are bright - oranges and yellows to lift the senses. Before she enters the room, the lover’s mood is anxious and full of fear and anticipation. Once she has arrived, his mood is ecstatic:
‘I listened with heart fit to break.
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;’
Once she is present, the lover wants the moment to last forever. He doesn’t want Porphyria to leave him, and in this way he is similar to the Duke, as he wants her all for himself.
Porphyria has a very seductive manner. She is not afraid to show off her body, and she makes it available to her lover:
‘She put my arm around her waist,
And made her smooth white shoulder bare
And all her yellow hair displaced’
The lover’s mood changes during the middle of the poem. He wants to preserve the perfect, passionate moment for ever, and realises that the only way to do this is to kill her - and set her free from all other ties, or perhaps another lover or her family.
‘Too weak, for all her heart’s endeavour,
To set its struggling passion free
From pride, and vainer ties dissever,
And give herself to me forever’
Robert Browning’s use of the word ‘worshipped’ during this section of the poem is very significant, as it explains to the reader that the lover wants the respect and worship from Porphyria, in a similar manner to the way the Duke in ‘My Last Duchess’ wants her all-encompassing respect above everything else.
At this moment of passion, Porphyria’s lover says he ‘debated what to do’. This shows that he is the one making all the decisive moves. The men are more important, they demonstrate their power over the opposite sex. The women in their lives get no say as to what happens with their own lives.
In ‘Porphyria’s Lover’, the narrator justifies his actions by saying he wants to preserve the perfect moment in time.
“That moment she was mine, mine, fair
Perfectly pure and good:”
At that point of passion, the narrator’s lover belongs to him totally - the repeated words “mine, mine” emphasise this. To stop the struggles and conflicts that would prevent them from seeing each other, he decides to kill her. His act of strangulation is a crime of passion - it is not pre-meditated.
At the end of ‘Porphyria’s lover’, the reader is led to believe that the lover feels no remorse for his actions. In fact, he has achieved his goal in preserving the moment. This is emphasised by the last two lines in the poem, where he even says that God has not shown any anger at his actions:
“And all night long we have not stirred
And yet God has not said a word”
In this poem the victim didn’t deserve to die but the Lover have shown that human impulse can reach a point where through paranoia it is irrational and deadly. This poem is a study of insanity as there is no rational reason for the actions taken and the two men do not acknowledge any guilt behind their actions. Neither had considered the feelings of the women and acted self-centred, thinking only about what they wanted. This poem show injustice and cruelty as a result of dissatisfaction from a certain situation.
