Explore the presentation of love and hate in the poems of Robert Browning
The recurring themes of love and hate are prominent in many of Browning's poems, and are in many cases evidently the inspiration for the stories and characters that he creates within his poetry. Browning explores the idea that hate is a consequence of love and the feelings associated with it – for example, in My Last Duchess, the Duke's love for the Duchess fuels his need for control over her, which eventually grows into hate.
The Laboratory tells the tale of a woman who has become so consumed by jealousy after her husband has become enamoured with her rivals, Elise and Pauline, that she has visited an alchemist in order to create a poison that would kill both of them without sparing any of the pain of death. Browning carefully structured this poem in order to emphasise the woman's desire for perfection and attention to detail - there is an even number of four-line stanzas with a constant rhyme scheme; the structure is as carefully plotted as the main character's lethal plan.
Also, even though the main character is intent on mercilessly killing two people, Browning portrays her as quite a likeable character: “That in the mortar – you call it a gum?/Ah, the brave tree whence such gold oozing come!”, her childlike enthusiasm and inquisitiveness makes her endearing and even identifiable with; it's obvious that she's not really an evil person, but love has skewed her sense of reality, making murder seem like the straightforward solution to her problem. This enthusiasm and inquisitiveness is similarly reflected in the poem's punctuation, with an unusual amount of question marks and particularly exclamation marks being made use of - this contradicts the poem's relatively dark, morose theme, lending an unconventionally upbeat mood to what should be a morbid poem. The penultimate stanza confirms the main character's upbeat attitude when she says to the alchemist: “Nay, be not morose;/It kills her, and this prevents seeing it close”; Browning's creation of such an upbeat mood in an otherwise dark poem may be a device used to explicitly present how it feels to be blinded by love and delighted by the consequences of hate. It should be noted that the main character doesn't blame her husband for being, as she says, “ensnared” by her rivals, even though, in reality, just as much blame should be placed on him, but her love for him compels her to ignore this.
