Porphyria's Lover by Robert Browning - an Analysis and exploration of the poem and the issues it raises.

Ryan Mullally 10A – Unit 3 English Coursework – Wilnecote High School – April 2002

Porphyria’s Lover by Robert Browning – an Analysis and exploration of the poem and the issues it raises

Overview of the poem

Porphyria's Lover, which first appeared in 1836, is one of the earliest and most shocking of Browning's dramatic monologues. The speaker lives in a cottage in the countryside. His lover, a budding young woman named Porphyria, comes in out of a storm and proceeds to make a fire and bring cheer to the cottage. She embraces the speaker, offering him her bare shoulder. He tells us that he does not speak to her. Instead, he says, she begins to tell him how she has momentarily overcome societal strictures to be with him. He realises that she ‘worshipped’ him at this instant. Realising that she will eventually give in to society's pressures, and wanting to preserve the moment, he wraps her hair around her neck and strangles her, apparently she ‘felt no pain’, the speaker is ‘quite sure’ of this. He then almost plays with her corpse, opening the eyes and propping the body up against his side. He sits with her body this way the entire night, the speaker remarking that God has not yet moved to punish him.

We see that this poem takes place in a cold, dark cottage during a violent storm. We know also that Porphyria comes to see her lover and tries to make his room more comfortable. It takes a little more analysis to understand why the two cannot marry; we need to take a few minutes to analyse Porphyria's refusal to ‘dissever’ her from ‘vainer ties’ when she passionately loves the speaker. After examining the setting and circumstances of the poem the fact that the speaker is the murderer is clear, he is speaking to no one except himself as he justifies his actions.

Porphyria's Lover is natural in its language; it does not display the colloquialisms or dialectical markers of some of some poems. Moreover, while the cadence of the poem mimics natural speech, it actually takes the form of highly patterned verse, rhyming ABABB. The intensity and asymmetry of the pattern suggests the madness concealed within the speaker's reasoned self-presentation.

This poem is a dramatic monologue--a fictional speech presented as the musings of a speaker who is separate from the poet. Browning wrote many other dramatic monologues, many famous, this one captures a moment after a main event or action. Porphyria already lies dead when the speaker begins. Just as the nameless speaker seeks to stop time by killing her, so too does this kind of poem seek to freeze the consciousness of an instant.

Commentary & Analysis

Porphyria's Lover opens with a scene taken straight from the romantic poetry of the earlier nineteenth century, this is perhaps the only conventional area of the poem, although this is used to great effect to almost mislead the reader, the poem is not in any other way similar to the romantic poetry of the 19th Century. The reader does not expect, unless they have prior knowledge of Browning’s dramatic monologues the macabre subject of the poem .While a storm rages outdoors, giving a demonstration of nature at its most sublime, the speaker sits in a cosy cottage. This is the picture of rural simplicity--a cottage by a lake, a rosy-cheeked girl, and a roaring fire. Browning uses literal imagery to construct the scene of the poem, the wind is personified as ‘awake’ and vexing the lake. However, once Porphyria begins to take off her wet clothing, the poem leaps into the modern world and into the defiance of Victorian morality. She bares her ‘smooth white shoulder’ to her lover, the alliteration using the consonant ‘s’ perhaps emphasises the sensuality of the moment, Porphyria then begins to caress the speaker, who we presume to be male; this is a level of overt sexuality that has not been seen in poetry since the Renaissance. It is then suggested in the writing that Porphyria is defying her family and friends to be with the speaker, who can be seen as the ‘vainer ties’ that she refuses to sever. The scene is now not just sexual, but transgressively so. Illicit sex out of wedlock presented a major concern for Victorian society; the famous Victorian prudery constituted only a backlash to what was in fact a popular obsession with the theme: the newspapers of the day revealed in stories about prostitutes and unwed mothers. Here, however, in ‘Porphyria's Lover’, sex appears as something natural, acceptable, and almost wholesome: Porphyria's girlishness and affection take prominence over any hints of immorality. Although sex out of wedlock is not explicitly detailed in the poem it is implied by the writing, the ‘gay feast’ the speaker refers to could easily be a reference to illicit sexual relations between Porphyria and the speaker.

Porphyria’s lover is an excellent example of where in a poem its speaker is not actually the poet, or so we assume. Robert Browning, the poet, is clearly not the ‘I’ who tells the tale because, as far as we know, Browning never murdered anybody. Anyway, in this case we have a monologue of sorts, and it is clear from the start that the speaker is unhappy, his mood is reflected in the choice of words. He projects his mood onto nature, which symbolises and mirrors his mood; the wind is ‘sullen’ (2) and is personified as spiteful, it attempts to ‘vex’ or anger the lake (3-4). The speaker himself is near heartbreak. Porphyria tries to change the mood. She glides in, starts the fire, tries to talk to her lover, and then sits beside him and arranges his head on her shoulder, her hair around them both. She even says that she loves him. But this is not enough. The reader notices that the speaker focuses on the fact that she's ‘too weak’ (22) to break whatever ‘vainer ties’ (24) hold her to someone else. She loves him, but he knows, or believes, that she won't be his entirely. At this moment he believes that ‘Porphyria worshipped’ him (33); if only he could keep this moment when she is his. The speaker appears to be very possessive over Porphyria, he refers to her as ‘mine, mine, fair, / Perfectly pure and good’ (36-37), the alliteration here and the use of the aural imagery helps to emphasise and convey the purity of Porphyria to the reader, furthermore the repetition of the word ‘mine’ emphasises the possessive nature of the narrator, and perhaps insanity. As the poem continues the speaker takes Porphyria’s long ‘yellow’ hair and asphyxiates her with it.

This is a preview of the whole essay

Furthermore the aftermath of the killing is interesting. He believes that she is ‘so glad’ that he has killed her (53) because he has allowed her to have her ‘utmost will’, something she could not bring herself to have. As the poem ends, but not concludes, the lovers sit together all night long with no sign of punishment from God, the speaker almost mocks the belief in God, he states that God has not ‘said a word’ in reference to what he has done, he is awaiting some form of retribution, however none has come – this is perhaps a clever anecdote inserted by Browning to challenge the belief of God and Christianity. This reflects the religious background of the poet and his own perspective of Christianity of the time. The question raised by the poem as well as the subjects of the poem, illicit sex before marriage and murder combine to make the poem a very outspoken one, even if the subjects are only suggested, the suggestion would have been enough to create controversy and backlashes in Victorian society.

For the Victorians, modernity meant numbness: urban life, with its constant over-stimulation and newspapers full of scandalous and horrifying stories, desensitised people to shock. Many believed that the onslaught of amorality and the constant assault on the senses could be counteracted only with an even greater shock. This is the principle Browning adheres to in ‘Porphyria's Lover.’ In light of contemporary scandals, the sexual transgression might seem insignificant; so Browning breaks through his reader's probable complacency by having Porphyria's lover murder her; and thus he provokes some moral or emotional reaction in his presumably numb audience. This is not to say that Browning is trying to shock us into condemning either Porphyria or the speaker for their sexuality; rather, he seeks to remind us of the disturbed condition of a lover restricted by society and convention.

This poem conflates sex, violence, and aesthetics. Like many Victorian writers, Browning was trying to explore the boundaries of sensuality in his work. Browning questions how it is that society, at the time of publication, considered the beauty of the female body to be immoral while never questioning the morality of language's sensuality. Browning questions why society sees both sex and violence as transgressive. The reader is left to wonder of the relationship between the two (sex and violence) and furthermore must decide which is worse. These are just some of the issues that Browning's poem posits. Furthermore Browning does not offer any answers to them: Browning was no moralist, although he is no libertine either. Porphyria's Lover explores this contradiction. The lover in the poem assumes she wants to, and we have no other source of information about them, but his view of them, which is certainly tainted by his own obsessions--as is the lover's judgement about what Porphyria really wants (to put it mildly).

Women, particularly for the Victorians, symbolised the home and the repository of traditional values. Their violent death can stand in for the death of society and rapidly changing values. The women in Porphyria’s Lover and in a significant proportion of Browning's poetry in particular are often depicted as sexually open: this may show that society has transformed so radically that even the domestic, the traditional, has been altered and corrupted. This violence also suggests the struggle between aesthetics and morals in Victorian art: while women typically serve as symbols of values (the moral education offered by the mother, the purity of one who stays within the confines of the home and remains untainted by the outside world), they also represent traditional foci for the aesthetic (in the form of sensual physical beauty); the conflict between the two is potentially explosive. Controlling and even destroying women is a way to try to prevent such explosions, to preserve a society that has already changed beyond recognition.

This poem is great and ingenious. It provides the reader with the strange and dark thoughts that accompany insanity and provides some insight on the demented reasoning of a killer. This poem allows the readers to imagine a state of mind that they will never encounter. This person's desire to control another person is the resolution to all the problems that the feels. His insanity provides him with the reasons to commit his act of murder. The desire to have someone else in their lives is strong in most of the people in this world, but Browning's description of a mad man's desire, shows how easy our desires can lead to madness. The reader is left to wonder what catalyst could have initiated his madness: poor experiences as a child, the loss of a loved one – there are numerous explanations. It could be seen that the speaker’s madness is a way to cope with the loss of a loved one and by killing Porphyria: the killer can be assured that he will always have someone to accompany him. The speaker, Porphyria's Lover, chillingly tells the story in a calm and steady tone, though actually he may have gone insane and killed Porphyria, it is not obvious. The calm nature of the speaker further aids the construction of surrealism in the poem, in no way do the speaker’s tone and the murder accompany each other, as I have previously explained the steady tone used by the speaker is used earlier in the poem as a device to fool the reader, therefore enhancing the shock of the killing even further. Throughout the poem there is no hint of violence.

When we analyse the speaker and consider what he reveals about himself we immediately assume that the speaker is insane. We are unaware of the severity of his depression, details from the poem, which illustrate his mental state. We discuss his lack of concern for his physical comfort, his inability to speak to Porphyria, and his illogical assumption that his act of murder is acceptable.

The reader questions if Porphyria is merely a hapless victim of her insane lover. If she is, the reader muses as to why she should sit demurely by her lover's side, innocent and sweet. Porphyria could also be seen as a victim of societal pressures, marrying the respected gentleman, unable to follow her heart. Porphyria could be a poor girl split between her head and her heart: a moral dilemma. This view is supported by the poem to an extent because she shows some passion and love for her ‘Lover’, bearing her shoulder to him; she seems almost desperate, knowing that she cannot marry him. On the other hand Porphyria could be interpreted by a reader as a teasing girl, the type of girl who wants to have her cake and eat it too. In other words, she may want to live the privileged life of high society, married to a proper, respectable, rich man while carrying on an exciting and sordid love affair with the poor speaker of the poem. If so, she could be seen as either brazen or coquettish, due to the indistinct nature of the poem there can be a number of interpretations of her character. We could also see the poem from a different angle perceiving that the lover might be a victim of Porphyria, a disease of the blood, any way the reader considers the poem it is extremely macabre and surreal – the blank and calm tone of the speaker contrasts the subject of death by asphyxiation. Porphyria's possible motivations for refusing to marry her lover could be multiple, yet coming to house on a stormy night to state and demonstrate her love for him shows her love for him, the speaker even goes as far as to suggest that Porphyria ‘worshipped’ him.

In today's world, we hear of many people in the position these two lovers. There are numerous examples of people who are caught in the same situation as Porphyria or her lover, however the moral view of this situation was completely different in the Victorian era, there is much less stigma over the subject in the modern day. The poem at the time of publication would have caused some controversy.

The life of the writer Robert Browning

Robert Browning was born in 1812, the son of fairly liberal parents who took an interest in his education and personal growth. He read voraciously as a youth, and began to write poetry while still quite young, influenced by , whose radicalism urged a rethinking of modern society. However, Browning's earliest works garnered him some negative attention for their expression of strong sensations their morbid tone. Thus for a time he set poetry aside to work on plays, finding in their fictional world an apt space for experimentation and development as a creative mind. Most of the plays did not find success, however, and Browning turned back again to verse.

Browning's first important poem was the lengthy Paracelsus, which appeared in 1835. This was essentially a long dramatic monologue, the poem described the career of the sixteenth-century alchemist, and achieved popular success, establishing Browning as a familiar name with the reading public, if not yet as a great poet. In 1841 Browning put out Pippa Passes, a loosely structured set of poems that draw from the sensationalism of modern media. This was followed by 1842's Dramatic Lyrics and 1845's Dramatic Romances and Lyrics. Along with the 1855 volume Men and Women and the 1864 book Dramatis Personae, these two collections, although not wild successes, contain most of the poems today considered central to the Browning canon. However the poet achieved true literary stardom with the publication of his verse novel The Ring and the Book, a historical tragedy based on a group of documents Browning had found at an Italian bookseller's. The work appeared in installments from 1868 to 1869, and Browning societies soon sprang up all over England, Browning soared to fame that he enjoyed until his death in 1889.

Just as Browning's professional life centred around this crucial publication, so too did his personal life centre around a crucial relationship. Following the appearance of her celebrated first collection, Browning had begun corresponding with the poet Elizabeth Barrett, a semi-invalid who lived in the home of her extremely protective father. Not long after their first face-to- face meeting, the two poets married in secret and fled to Italy, where they lived until Elizabeth's death in 1861. During this time critics considered Elizabeth much the finer poet, and scholars even proposed her as a candidate for poet laureate when died ( received the honour instead). Although Elizabeth Barrett Browning's work still receives much scholarly attention, Robert Browning's subtle, detail-oriented poems have proven attractive to modern critics, and he has now replaced his wife as the Browning of favour.

Browning lived and wrote during a time of major societal and intellectual upheaval, and his poems reflect this world. England was becoming increasingly urban, and newspapers daily assaulted the senses with splashy tales of crime and lust in the city. Many people began to lose faith in religion as various new scientific theories rocked society - most notably Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, articulated in his 1859 The Origin of Species, and many questioned the old bases of morality. Just as religion and science were shifting in their roles, so, too, was art: artists and critics were moving toward what would become the art for art's sake movement at the end of the nineteenth century. Browning responded to these cultural upheavals in the 1840s and '50s with poems in which he explores the relationship of morality to art and the conflict between aesthetics and didacticism. Mid- 19th-century Britain experienced economic turmoil as well: wealth and consumption were on the rise at the same time that poverty soared, and the need to reconcile these two facts finds an analogue in the struggle to decide between material beauty -often manifested in luxurious furnishings, decorations, ornament, and clothing, and morality, in the form of a concern for the poor. Browning explores all of these issues in his poetry, even though he sets many of them in the Renaissance or other distant historical periods; this is part of his way of achieving relevance while never becoming moralistic or overly strident. However Browning's genius was laid not so much in his choice of subject matter or setting, but in his craftsmanship: the fascination of his poetry owes to his strong portrayal of characters and his wealth of detail.

In many of his poems, violence, along with sex, becomes the symbol of the modern urban-dwelling condition. Many of Browning's more disturbing poems, including Porphyria's Love reflect this notion of the changing times and society he lived in.

This apparent moral decay of Victorian society, coupled with an ebbing of interest in religion, led to a morally conservative backlash. So-called Victorian prudery arose as an attempt to rein in something that was seen as out- of-control, an attempt to bring things back to the way they once were. Thus everything came under moral scrutiny, even art and literature. Many of Browning's poems try to work out the proper relationship between art and morality: Should art have a moral message? Can art be immoral? Are aesthetics and ethics inherently contradictory aims? These are all questions with which Browning's poetry struggles. The new findings of science, most notably evolution, posed further challenges to traditional religious ideas, suggesting that empiricism--the careful recording of observable details--could serve as a more relevant basis for human endeavour, whether intellectual or artistic.

In exploring these issues of art and modernity, Browning uses the dramatic monologue. A dramatic monologue is a poem with a speaker who is clearly separate from the poet, who speaks to an implied audience that, while silent, remains present in the scene. (This implied audience distinguishes the dramatic monologue from the soliloquy--a form also used by Browning--in which the speaker does not address any specific listener, rather musing aloud to him or herself). The purpose of the monologue (and the soliloquy) is not so much to make a statement about its declared subject matter, but to develop the character of the speaker. For Browning, the genre provided a sort of play-space and an alternative persona with which he can explore sometimes-controversial ideas. He often further distanced himself by employing historical characters, particularly from the Italian Renaissance where art and religion were two juxtaposing issues. Thus this temporal setting gives Browning a good analogue for exploring issues of art and morality and for looking at the ways in which social power could be used (and misused: the Victorian period saw many moral pundits assume positions of social importance). Additionally, the monologue form allows Browning to explore forms of consciousness and self-representation. This aspect of the monologue underwent further development by some of Browning's successors, among them and .

Browning devoted much attention not only to creating a strong sense of character, but also to developing a high level of historic specificity and general detail. These concerns reflected Victorian society's new emphasis on empiricism. In its scholarly detail and its connection to the past Browning's work also implicitly considers the relationship of modern poets to a greater literary tradition. At least two of Browning's finest dramatic monologues take their inspiration from moments in Shakespeare's plays, and other poems consider the matter of one's posterity and potential immortality as an artist. As a result of the rapid changed in societal values, Browning and his contemporaries could not be certain that the works of canonical artists like Shakespeare and Michelangelo would continue to have relevance in the emerging New World. Thus these writers worried over their own legacy as well. However, Browning's poetry has lasted--perhaps precisely because of its very topical nature: its active engagement with the debates of its times, and the intelligent strategies with which it handles such era-specific material. Browning often explored the speaker's point of view by means of imaginative sympathy the reader's job is to achieve that sympathy with the Browning monologue the reader may instead take the part of the listener, and this point of view is always available within the form. Indeed, the auditor may appear to be absent or dead as in , out of earshot, or simply inattentive. It is this strongly rhetorical language which distinguishes the dramatic monologue from the soliloquy, for it shows the speaker arguing with a second self. We are coaxed out of our natural sympathy with the first-person speaker by the vehemence of the arguments made. We are always left to muse over many questions and with Poems like Porphyria’s lover many people have different opinions.

The distinguishing characteristic of Browning's dramatic monologues is that they make new demands of the reader, and those extra-textual demands are signalled within the text by the figure of the auditor. That listening figure and the tone that the speaker adopts in order to make his or her case are the most important new ingredients in the dramatic monologues. As a result of the listener not always physically present in the monologues, most critical assessments have misunderstood its significance. In fact, the presence of the auditor determines how the reader must react to the speaker, and thus the proper questions about the poem are not those which ask about the relationship between the speaker's ideas and the poet's; instead we must ask about the speaker's effect upon his listener. From this rhetorical effect we can infer the dramatic situation, and it is the interplay among the characters in these scenes which Browning wishes us to imagine. Observing the speakers as their listeners do, we find we have to piece together scraps of information to complete a picture of the speaker, and even, sometimes, simply to figure out what is going on. Thus, in each re-reading we must relive the process of discovery that the listener experiences. Rather than a balance of sympathy and judgement, a better description of this process of discovery is engagement, then detachment: we readers must become engaged in the game of imagination which the poem asks us to play before we can attain a detached, critical view of the whole work.