Porphyria's Lover Analysis
'Porphyria's lover' by Robert Browning is the description of an intimate night-time meeting between a man, the lover and narrator, and a woman, Porphyria. The word Porphyria itself is a medical disorder which involves painful symptoms - this suggests that something painful will happen to the girl sometime in the poem. Within the first couple of lines Browning set the mood for the poem, 'the sullen wind was soon awake, it tore the elm-tops down for spite,' It's a description of the elements battling it out in the dark of the night, which is perhaps a metaphor for a prior argument between lovers. The timing of the meeting, in the middle of the night, may suggest that this was a secret assignation, something that was always going to happen, like it was fate. At the start of this poem, Browning suggests that Porphyria was once blinded by her pride and vanity and rejected the lover; however he suggests that she gave in to her passions and pursued him. Porphyria then 'shut the cold and the storm' out as if the lover had been sitting in the cottage with doors and windows open, exposed to the weather, and she comes to close the doors and window. This imagery may represent a desire to stop arguing, to calm the storm. She then proceeds into the warm cottage and take off her sodden clothes, 'withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl.' She then speaks to her lover however he doesn't respond