“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.”
By contrast, the Duke in ‘My Last Duchess’ is shown as a cold-hearted man who despised his late wife’s lust for life. He wanted her respect, though all he could see was her pleasure from all around her.
“She had A heart - how shall I say? - too soon made glad, Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er She looked on, and her looks went everywhere”
In both poems, there are similarities in the narrator’s attitudes towards their women. Both narrators show an unnatural possessiveness towards them, they show jealousy, in that they wanted to own all other interests that their women may have. It means that in each poem, the men (narrators) end up killing their wives. In ‘Porphyria’s Lover’, the narrator justifies his actions by saying he wanted to preserve the perfect moment in time.
“That moment she was mine, mine, fair Perfectly pure and good:”
At that point the narrator’s lover belonged to him totally, the repeated words “mine, mine” emphasises this. To stop the conflicts that would prevent them from seeing each other, he decided to kill her. His act of strangulation was a crime of passion - it was not pre-meditated.
By contrast, the death of the Duchess was a cold, well planned move by the Duke to remove the source of his jealousy. He thought she shouldn’t treat others the same as him, because he was an important individual.
“She thanked men, - good! But thanked Somehow - I know not how - as if she ranked My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name With anybody’s gift.”
The Duke justifies his actions by thinking his wife did not deserve her position as Duchess, or live up to the responsibilities that her title required.
In “My Last Duchess” the Duke does not seem to show any compassion or understanding for his late wife. Indeed, he seems to be more of a ‘woman collector’ in the way that he collects art, as he sets his sights on the daughter of the Count. “Though his fair daughter’s self, as I avowed At starting, is my object”
At the start of ‘My Last Duchess’ the Duke is showing off a portrait to a guest and states that she looks as if she was still alive, this immediately informs us that she is dead. He decides to hide the portrait behind some curtains and he acts like he still owns her in the way that he would own an object.
‘The depth of passion in that earnest glance, But to myself they turned (since none puts by The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)’
The Duke belittles the Duchess’s joy in life and shows a nasty attitude towards the pleasure she gets from the simple things in life - a sunset, or a bough of cherries. On the other hand, the reader gets the impression that the Duchess has a kind, happy nature, who finds joy in all things, though it is true that she found joy in compliments from other men, yet this doesn’t mean that she betrayed her husband, even though he obviously thought that she had been unfaithful.
The Duke reveals to the reader that he never discussed his jealousy or feelings with his wife. He never told her about the things that he disliked about her, as he thought that this was stooping below his level.
“and I choose Never to stoop”
This reveals that the Duke was a very egotistical man, who preferred to remain, rather than to try to talk to her and fix the situation. He was a distant man with a strong disliking of conversations. Even though she is now dead, the Duke likes to think that he still has control of his late wife by hiding her behind a curtain. He does this so that her glance doesn’t attract other men.
The character in ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ is revealed in a similar way to the way in which the Duke’s character is revealed in ‘My Last Duchess’ as the narrator gives an insight of his feelings to the reader. The mood at the beginning of ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ is bleak. Browning emphasises this by using the weather to describe the Lover’s emotion, which is spiteful and distraught.
“The rain set early in to-night, The sullen wind was soon awake It tore the elm-tops down for spite And did its worst to vex the lake”
When Porphyria enters the room, the mood changes at once. Whereas at the start of the poem, you feel like the ‘colours’ are cold. As soon as Porphyria enters the room the ‘colours’ are bright, you sense this because Browning uses words like ‘Blaze’ and ‘warm’. Before she enters the room, the lover’s mood is full of fear and impatience. Once she has arrived, his mood is uplifted.
‘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.
The reader gets the impression that Porphyria is a woman of little virtue. She has a very seductive manner, which both at the time, and in the present day, appears to be very ‘erotic’. 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 keep the perfect moment for ever, and realises that the only way to do this is to kill her - and set her free from all other commitments, or another lover.
‘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 - and mimics the treatment of the Duchess by the Duke. The men are all important, they demonstrate their dominance over the opposite sex. The women in their lives get no say as to what happens with their own lives, this was very common at this era.
At the end of ‘Porphyria’s lover’, the reader is led to believe that the lover feels no remorse for his actions. This is shown 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”
You can compare this to ‘My Last Duchess’ where again, the Duke shows no remorse for ordering the death of his wife.
The reader is given an insight into the way relationships between men and women were viewed in the last century, and earlier, during the time of the Renaissance. Without doubt, men had the dominant role, and women had little freedom. Women were duty-bound to show unquestioning respect for the men in their lives, regardless of how they were treated. In Porphyria’s lover, Browning shows us a woman who is not following this role model. In fact, she is completely the opposite, she is fulfilling the role of a male fantasy by taking a dominant role, with her sexual intentions.
In the eyes of a modern reader, neither poem is particularly shocking, as people are more accustomed to material of a revealing nature. This shows that when reading these poems, the reader has to bear in mind the times they were written. A reader in the early nineteenth century would have been quite interested in these poems because that’s what Victorians preferred, and the poem was meant to shock.
