Robert Browning: Poems Summary and Analysis of "Porphyria's Lover"

Summary

The narrator of "Porphyria's Lover" is a man who has murdered his lover, Porphyria. He
begins by describing the tumultuous weather of the night that has just passed. It has been
rainy and windy, and the weather has put the speaker in a melancholy mood as he waits in his
remote cabin for Porphyria to arrive.
Finally, she does, having left a society party and transcended her class expectations to visit
him. Wet and cold, she tends to the fire and then leans against the narrator, professing quietly
her love and assuring him she was not deterred by the storm.

He looks up into her face and realizes that she "worshipp'd" him in this moment, but that she
would ultimately return to the embrace of social expectation. Taken by the purity of the
moment, he does what comes naturally: he takes her hair and strangles her to death with it.
He assures his listener that she died painlessly. After she dies, he unwinds her hair and lays
her corpse out in a graceful pose with her eyes opened and her lifeless head on his shoulder.

As he speaks, they sit together in that position, and he is certain he has granted her greatest
wish by allowing them to be together without any worries. He ends by remarking that God
"has not yet said a word" against him.

Analysis

"Porphyria's Lover," published in 1836, is one of Browning's first forays into the dramatic
monologue form (though he wouldn't use that term for a while). The basic form of his
dramatic monologues is a first person narrator who presents a highly subjective perspective
on a story, with Browning's message coming out not through the text but through the ironic
disconnect of what the speaker justifies and what is obvious to the audience.

In this poem, the irony is abundantly clear: the speaker has committed an atrocious act and
yet justifies it as not only acceptable, but as noble. Throughout the poem, the imagery and
ideas suggest an overarching conflict of order vs. chaos, with the most obvious manifestation
being the way the speaker presents his beastly murder as an act of rationality and love.
The clearest example of the disconnect between order and chaos comes in the poetic form.
The poetry follows an extremely regular meter of iambic tetrameter (four iambic feet per
line), with a regular rhyme scheme. In other words, Browning, always a precise and
meticulous poet, has made certain not to reflect madness or chaos in the rhyme scheme, but
instead to mirror the speaker's belief that what he does is rational.

Indeed, the order that the speaker brings to such a chaotic act is explained with rather
romantic rationale. Porphyria, it is implied, is a rich lady of high social standing, while the
speaker, out in his remote cabin, is not. She has chosen on this night to leave the social order
of the world and retreat into the chaos of the storm to quell her tumultuous feelings for this
narrator. Thus there is some indication of the theme of class, though it is far less pervasive in
the poem than are the large questions of human nature. When the speaker realizes that
Porphyria ultimately will choose to return to the order of society, while simultaneously
believing that she wishes to be with him – she "worshipp'd" him, after all – he chooses to
immortalize this moment by removing her ability to leave.

In this line of thought lies the key to understanding much of Browning's poetry: his sense of
subjective truth. Unlike most poets, whose messages, even when obtuse, are fully formed,
Browning believes humans to be full of contradictions and malleable personalities that shift
constantly, sometimes moment to moment. Even if we assume the speaker understands the
situation correctly when he identifies Porphyria as purely devoted to him at the moment of
the murder, we are also to believe that she will soon retreat to a different contradictory
personality, one that prizes social acceptance. So what the speaker undertakes is in some
ways a fallacious yet heroic goal: to save Porphyria from the tumultuous contradictions of
human nature, to preserve her in a moment of pure happiness and contentment with existing
in chaos.

It is also interesting how Browning uses so much stock, melodramatic imagery to set his
poem up. While the storm certainly suits his ideas as a symbol of chaos (as opposed to the
order of society), it is akin to the 'dark and stormy night' setups of traditional stories.
However, once Porphyria enters, the poem moves to a more explicitly sexual place – notice
the imagery as she undresses and dries herself – that suddenly equates those natural forces
with the human forces of sexuality. The speaker, who had "listen'd with heart fit to break" to
the storm, seems to recognize in both of these parallel forces the existence of the
uncontrollable. Considering the Victorian period in which Browning wrote, this sense of
sexual freedom could be expected to prompt a judgment from his audience on Porphyria as
an unwed sexual woman, a judgment that is quickly reversed when she becomes the victim of
an even darker human impulse than sexuality (though one most certainly tied in with it). It is
worth mentioning that the speaker does not take any sexual license with her dead body, but
instead tries to maintain a sense of the purity he had glimpsed in her, creating a tableaux with
her head on his shoulder that evokes childish affection rather than adult depravity. As with all
things, Browning complicates rather than simplifies.

The overarching message of the poem is thus that humans are full of contradictions. We are
drawn to both the things we love and the things we hate, and we are eminently capable of
rationalizing either choice. Through such measured and considered language, we are invited
to approve of the murder even as it disgusts us, and in the murder itself we are to forgive the
woman for what we (at least if we were Victorian) might have otherwise judged her. Humans
are creatures of transience and chaos, even as we belabor the attempt to convince ourselves
that we are rational and that our choices are sound.

"Porphyria's Lover" was quite subversive for its time (and to an extent, still is) but prose
writers of Browning's Victorian England were also dabbling in Gothic literature and horror.
This is one of many examples where Browning shared more with his contemporary prose
writers than with his contemporary poets.

The poem is a dramatic monologue which means the speaker addresses someone (perhaps
himself, God, the reader, or some other) and his words and thoughts indicate to the reader his
character and/or state of mind. The ababb rhyme scheme and occasional enjambment (lines
which grammatically carry over from one line to the next) establish a subtly odd phrasing
which parallels the subtle ways Browning establishes the state of mind of the speaker (we get
subtle clues but are taken by surprise with the murder).

The poem is about the speaker murdering his lover, Porphyria, by strangling her with her own
hair. This poem is an exercise in considering madness, the potential link between violence
and sex, and the psychological impact love can have (in this case, on an insane speaker;
however, the reader is also left to wonder if the speaker is not insane, perhaps merely a liar).

The calm, casual way the speaker describes the murder is strange, reflecting the warped mind
of the speaker. And the event of the murder seems to come out of nowhere unless we
consider that the murder is a shift of dominance. When Porphyria comes in, she is active and
the speaker is passive.

She put my arm about her waist,

And made her smooth white shoulder bare,

And all her yellow hair displaced,

And, stooping, made my cheek lie there, (16-19).

Notice that she physically controls his movements and "makes" his cheek lie. The speaker,
mad with love and insecurity, sees a moment where he can become the dominant figure in
their love and takes it, and this takes the reader by surprise. He waits until the "moment she
was mine, mine, fair,/Perfectly pure and good." Therefore, he can be with her in this so called
"perfect" state forever.

"Porphyria's Lover" is similar to Poe in its treatment of Gothic subjects. And some critics
claim that a full analysis of this poem along the lines of Gothic horror has been overlooked.
Check the third link below for an analysis which posits that the speaker is not really insane;
he kills Porphyria believing she is a vampire. This interpretation is a bit of a stretch, but
horror was a contemporary subject in Browning's time. For example,Frankensteinwas
published in 1818, Poe lived from 1809-1849, and "Porphyria's Lover" first appeared in
1836.

Commentary
“Porphyria’s Lover” opens with a scene taken straight from the Romantic poetry of the
earlier nineteenth century. While a storm rages outdoors, giving a demonstration of nature at
its most sublime, the speaker sits in a cozy cottage. This is the picture of rural simplicity—a
cottage by a lake, a rosy-cheeked girl, a roaring fire. However, once Porphyria begins to take
off her wet clothing, the poem leaps into the modern world. She bares her shoulder to her
lover and begins to caress him; this is a level of overt sexuality that has not been seen in
poetry since the Renaissance. We then learn that Porphyria is defying her family and friends
to be with the speaker; 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 reveled in stories about prostitutes and unwed mothers. Here,
however, in “Porphyria’s Lover,” sex appears as something natural, acceptable, almost
wholesome: Porphyria’s girlishness and affection take prominence over any hints of
immorality.

For the Victorians, modernity meant numbness: urban life, with its constant over-stimulation
and newspapers full of scandalous and horrifying stories, immunized 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 the modern psyche. In fact, “Porphyria’s Lover” was first
published, along with another poem, under the title Madhouse Cells, suggesting that the
conditions of the new “modern” world served to blur the line between “ordinary life”—for
example, the domestic setting of this poem—and insanity—illustrated here by the speaker’s
action.
This poem, like much of Browning’s work, conflates sex, violence, and aesthetics. Like many
Victorian writers, Browning was trying to explore the boundaries of sensuality in his work.
How is it that society considers the beauty of the female body to be immoral while never
questioning the morality of language’s sensuality—a sensuality often most manifest in
poetry? Why does society see both sex and violence as transgressive? What is the
relationship between the two? Which is “worse”? These are some of the questions that
Browning’s poetry posits. And he typically does not offer any answers to them: Browning is
no moralist, although he is no libertine either. As a fairly liberal man, he is confused by his
society’s simultaneous embrace of both moral righteousness and a desire for sensation;
“Porphyria’s Lover” explores this contradiction

Although there are many themes in each work of literature, if I had to boil this down to one, I
would say that Robert Browningstresses the theme of violent love (especially in relation to
madness) in his poem "Porphyria's Lover."
Upon first glance, the idea of "violent love" seems like an oxymoron; however, after reading
the poem, the relationship becomes clear. The speaker has a desire to keep Porphyria all his
own. In order to do this, he strangles her with her own hair.

There is no doubt, however, that love (or at least infatuation) exists between the two:

She put my arm about her waist,

And made her smooth white shoulder bare,
And all her yellow hair displaced,
And, stooping, made my cheek lie there,
And spread, o'er all, her yellow hair,
Murmuring how she loved me

According to this quotation, the love between the two people here is quite passionate and
sexual in nature. Unfortunately, the extreme passion that exists between the two leads the
speaker to violence in order to claim Porphyria for his own, forever:

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.

As love leads to violence, one has to admit that mental illness, or if I may use the more
common term "madness," to be involved here. The speaker talks about how Porphyria's blue
eyes "laughed" and how her head was still "smiling" after she was dead. Further, the act of
murder itself caused her to feel "no pain.' The speaker strangles her as he is "quite sure she
felt no pain." He then props her "laughing" eyes open yet again, to kiss Porphyria as she lay
there, dead. However, probably the biggest indicator of madness can be found in the last few
lines:

And thus we sit together now,

And all night long we have not stirred,
And yet God has not said a word!
The speaker is now sitting, hour upon hour, and caressing a dead body. Death has not
seemed to stop the speaker's sexual attraction to Porphyria. Further, there seems to be an
indication here that the speaker's grave sin would have actually prompted God to
speak. Thus, the speaker sits, clinging to a dead body for sexual gratification as he waits for
God to rebuke his action. Yuck!