‘Too weak for all her heart’s endeavour,
To set its struggling passion free
From pride’
We finally see Porphyria described as weak, but this is not a weakness of the body or of action, but rather of spirit and we are led to believe that her lover sees her as too proud to love, and it is in this belief that he has been suffering and that is what has made him weak.
However, at this point her lover looks into her eyes and sees that she does love him:
‘...at last I knew
Porphyria worshipped me: surprise
Made my heart swell,’
It is in these lines that we see the balance of power alter, secure in the knowledge that the object of his worship in fact worships him, Porphyria’s lover takes control of the situation and is finally able to act. In the moment that she is finally truly his ‘ perfectly pure and good’ he chooses to keep her at that moment forever and:
‘....all her hair
In one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around,
And strangled her’
In doing this Porphyria’s lover is able to keep his most perfect image of Porphyria and indeed what a woman should be forever, so that she would ever remain, silent, adoring and helpless. Having done so, he is able to manipulate her rather than the other way around, and this is most apparent in the lines:
‘I propped her head up as before,
Only this time my shoulder bore
Her head’
Porphyria’s lover has removed all her power and in this he is now in the position that she occupied before, and all possibility of a return to the previous order is removed:
‘That all it scorned at once is fled,
And I its love, am gained instead!’
With her dead, Porphyria’s lover feels able to maintain a feeling of security that he was not able to during her life.
However, the final line of the poem is particularly interesting:
‘And yet God has not said a word’
This line suggests that Porphyrias love was expecting some sort of retribution from God which has not come, and in its absence is able to justify his actions, but at the same time it could be suggested that with the death of Porphyria, we also see the death of God.
The second of Browning’s poems I have chosen to look at is Women And Roses. In this poem we are more clearly able to hear the voice of the poet as he muses on women in the past the present and the future and the love he feels for them. Unlike in Porphyria’s Lover, the love for the women in Women And Roses is not for a specific individual woman, but for women as an objectified other. We find that these woman are much easier to love than an actual woman such as Porphyria because they are not individual, but rather:
‘...faded for ages
Sculpted in stone, on the poet’s pages’
These women are frozen in time and idealised. Here we see a similarity to Porphyria however, as after her death she too was frozen in time rendering her an object that could be idealised.
The first section of Women And Roses deals with women from the past, these women are unreachable to the poet as suggested in the lines:
‘Stay then stoop, since I cannot climb,
You great shapes of the antique time’
It seems that it is the fact that these women are unattainable that makes them so attractive to the poet, but at the same time he laments their passing and the passion that passes when life does.
In the second part of the poem the poet focuses on the women that exist in the present, but still her does not talk about a particular woman, but rather the possibilities for passion that may exist with any living woman:
‘Eyes in your eyes, lips on your lips!
Fold me fast where the cincture slips
Prison all my soul in eternities of pleasure’
This plea on behalf of the poet is pure hyperbole as he is calling out to all women and yet no woman describing what in reality would be a momentary pleasure as an eternity, and this serves to exemplify the idealism in the verse.
In the third part of the poem Browning laments the women that will exist and that he will never see, this final set of women appear to be even more attractive to the poet:
‘What is far conquers what is near.’
These women are the most perfect in the poets eye as they are whatever his imagination is capable of creating, they are the perfect idealistic objectification. These women spring from the poet’s imagination in the moment of the poem being written just as they will spring from the earth to which he has returned.
‘I will make an Eve, be the artist that began her,
Shaped her to his mind’
In Porphyria’s Lover and Women And Roses, Browning treats us to two very different poems where a woman or women are the main subject matter. However, in both poems we see that the ideal figure of woman is one who has passed or is yet to be born as then she is able to exist in the most perfect state possible, not that of a real person with flaws and free will, but in that of a pure fantasy.