The narrator becomes active at the same time that Porphyria becomes passive, goes into the background while the narrator takes the scene and turns it to his own advantage.
The narrator is deeply critical of Porphyria, we can see that he considers her to be a weak specimen when he puts “she too weak, for all her heart’s endeavor to set its struggling passion free from pride, and vainer ties dissever.”
The narrator, having become the active character, realizes that Porphyria “worshipped” him, and that she was ”mine, mine, fair, perfectly pure and good” meaning that she was pure as if she were a worshipper of a god, he feels like she is worshipping him and followers would do to a god in a temple having cleansed (purified) themselves.
This is when he decides to kill her, perhaps as an imitation of a sacrifice. “I found a thing to do, and all her hair in one long yellow string I wound three times her little throat around, and strangled her” The narrator keeps trying to convince himself that she felt no pain when he strangled her by the way he says “No pain felt she; I am quite sure she felt no pain.”
And also by giving her living characteristics: “ again laughed the blue eyes without a stain.”, “and I untightened next the tress about her neck; her cheek once more blushed bright beneath my burning kiss”. He puts that her cheeks blush bright, as if she were blushing when he kisses her, but in fact it is only the blood rushing back to her head having been stuck when he cut off her air supply by strangling her.
Once he has killed her, he maneuvers the body to make it seem as if it is still alive.
Porphyria has now become not a person, but an object.
When he says “Porphyria’s love: she guessed not how her darling one wish would be heard.”, we see that the narrator is talking about Porphyria as a predator would talk about their prey.
But at the end of the poem the two are unified, the dead and the living, the narrator and his object of obsession, which only a few moment before was the other way round, when Porphyria was obsessed with her lover, the passive narrator.
We can see that the narrator shows his combination of his possessing her when eh says : “And thus we sit together now, and all night long we have not stirred, and yet God has not said a word!” Here he is saying that God does not have anything against what the narrator did, that God does to have anything to condone, what the narrator did was right through his eyes.
My Last Duchess :
Even just looking at the title, My Last Duchess, we can see that the narrator is extremely possessive of her, she does not have a name, perhaps to him her name is not important to the narrator, we can also guess that the Duchess dies not that long ago, as the “last” emphasizes that it was most recent. The imagery is very explicit, there is a lot of description, but not as much as in Porphyria’s Lover.
When he shows the steward the painting of his ex-wife, he says “looking as if she were alive” , so we can immediately deduce that she is not. He also calls “that piece a wonder, now”, which shows us that he did not think it a wonder at all before.
He tells the steward that only he looks at his wife, that noone before the steward has seen it before, when he says “But to myself they turned (since none puts by the curtain I have drawn for you, but I)”.
The narrator is neurotic, he thought that his ex-wife was cheating on him. We can see that he was even jealous of the painter he hired to paint a portrait of his wife: ”Sir, t’was not her husbands presence only, called that spot of joy into the Duchess’ cheek”
He calls her pitiful , and also tries to be subtle when he says that she did not need much to be happy, that she was very easily impressed, that she used to like whatever she looked on. Here we see where the beginning of his jealousy troubles were when he says “Her looks went everywhere, Sir, t’was all one!” He is talking to the servant of his father-in-law-to-be about his ex-wife, perhaps so that his next wife will be warned about what not to do when married to the narrator.
He wanted a special recognition from his wife, but she treated him just like she treated all the other men who flocked around her.
She was not very bright, but we can see that although not very intelligent, she was happy in a simple sad way.
The narrator asks the servant a lot of theoretical questions which he does not expect an answer to.
He says that she was an individual but that if he had asked her questions she would just have made up excuses, he never thinks about the possibility that she would have done anything to change her manner of doing things.
As time goes by, he became more and more jealous, which we can see when he says: “ Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt, whene’er I passed her; but who passed without much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands; then all smiles stopped together.” We now know that he gave orders for his wife to be killed.
We see that even if he admitted that he might have been wrong, then he would have to stoop to admitting that he was jealous, which in his mind was degrading.
The narrator is unbending, he refuses ever to stop.
At the end of this poem, the narrator draws the curtains on his last duchess’ portrait and says to the servant that they will go down and see the “company below”.
He has hinted to the man-servant that he does not like disobedience and also that he doesn’t like his wives flirting with other men, event thought it would appear that is it just his mind that is making him think that his waves are flirting, and this makes him jealous.
The atmosphere is permanently tense, the narrator seems as if at any minute he might snap.
The narrator is the main character, he does all the talking, all the actions, the servant is in fact just another spectator.
Conclusion:
In both of Browning’s poems, My Last Duchess and Porphyria’s Lover, we have a very clear story of what’s going on, the story itself is interesting, and the way that he has turned them into poems is also very good, but I would say that he is better as a storyteller, not as a poet.
If I had to choose one poem that I thought was more poetry and less storytelling, in my opinion it would have to be My Last Duchess, in Porphyria’s Lover there is too much picture description, which you would get in a story when setting the scene. It is a very good poem, but it would probably be described as more of a story.