“PORPHYRIA’S LOVER” By Robert Browning

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:

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;

Which done, she rose, and from her form

Withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl,

And laid her soiled gloves by, untied

Her hat and let the damp hair fall,

And, last, she sat down by my side

And called me. When no voice replied,

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--she

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 for ever.

But passion sometimes would prevail,

Nor could to-night's gay feast restrain

A sudden thought of one so pale

For love of her, and all in vain:

So, she was come through wind and rain.

Be sure I looked up at her eyes

Happy and proud; at last I knew

Porphyria worshipped me; surprise

Made my heart swell, and still it grew

While I debated what to do.

That moment she was mine, mine, fair,

Perfectly pure and good: 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. No pain felt she;

I am quite sure she felt no pain.

As a shut bud that holds a bee,

I warily oped her lids: again

Laughed the blue eyes without a stain.

And I untightened next the tress

About her neck; her cheek once more

Blushed bright beneath my burning kiss:

I propped her head up as before,

Only, this time my shoulder bore

Her head, which droops upon it still:

The smiling rosy little head,

So glad it has its utmost will,

That all it scorned at once is fled,

And I, its love, am gained instead!

Porphyria's love: she guessed not how

Her darling one wish would be heard.

And thus we sit together now,

And all night long we have not stirred,

And yet God has not said a word!

http://quotations.about.com/cs/poemlyrics/a/Porphyrias_Love.htm

“SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY” By Lord Byron

She walks in beauty, like the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies,

And all that's best of dark and bright

Meets in her aspect and her eyes;

Thus mellow'd to that tender light

Which Heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,

Had half impair'd the nameless grace

Which waves in every raven tress

Or softly lightens o'er her face,

Where thoughts serenely sweet express

How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek and o'er that brow

So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,

The smiles that win, the tints that glow,

But tell of days in goodness spent,—

A mind at peace with all below,

A heart whose love is innocent.

http://classicpoetryaloud.podomatic.com/entry/2007-06-21T05_25_11-07_00

First of all, I am going to focus this commentary on two poems, the first one that I am going to treat is “Porphyria’s Lover” by Robert Browning and the second one is “She walks in beauty” by Lord Byron.

These two poems were written by different authors and in different periods, but they still have similarities and also some differences. I will briefly introduce them in the period they belong to, and afterwards explain or analyse each poem, at the same time I relate them within the theme I will focus in, which is love. Both of the poems talk about a woman, it is obvious that we are talking of love poems.

“Porphyria’s Lover belongs to the Victorian period while “She walks in beauty” belong to the Romantic one.

An idea of the significance women had in the Victorian period is the following: “The status of Women in the Victorian Era is often seen as an illustration of the striking discrepancy between England's national power and wealth and what many, then and now, consider its appalling social conditions. Also, they were seen as pure and clean. Because of this view, their bodies were seen as temples which should not be adorned with jewellery nor used for physical exertion or pleasurable sex. The role of women was to have children and tend to the house, in contrast to men, according to the concept of Victorian masculinity. They could not hold a job unless it was that of a teacher or a domestic servant, nor were they allowed to have their own checking accounts or savings accounts”. (Woman in the Victorian era – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia).

An introduction for Romanticism can be the following: “Romanticism is an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated around the middle of the 18th century in Western Europe, and gained strength during the Industrial Revolution. It was partly a revolt against aristocratic, social, and political norms of the Enlightenment period and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature in art and literature. The movement stressed strong emotion as a source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror, and the awe experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature. It elevated folk art, nature and custom, as well as arguing for an epistemology based on nature, which included human activity conditioned by nature in the form of language, custom and usage. It was influenced by ideas of the Enlightenment and elevated medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived to be from the medieval period. The name "romantic" itself comes from the term "romance" which is a prose or poetic heroic narrative originating in medieval literature and romantic literature.” “In visual art and literature, "Romanticism" typically refers to the late 18th century through the mid 19th century. Recurring themes found in Romantic literature are the criticism of the past, emphasis on women and children, and respect for nature. Furthermore, several romantic authors, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, based their writings on the supernatural/occult and human psychology, with which they were fascinated”. (Romanticism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia).

I will start analyzing “Phorphyria’s Lover” one of the most important works of Robert Browning. We can say that the poem is a monologue of a mad man who wants to keep Porphyria and her love forever. It is a love story that ends with a dead woman.

Reading throughout the poem we can see that only one voice appears (the man), but we do understand that also another one is present in the text. It is the man adopting the female’s voice. “In addition to projecting all their desires onto a female object, male speakers in Victorian poetry sometimes use their narrative voice to suppress the female point of view and enforce codes of patriarchal domination. There are typically three ways in which male speakers objectify women. Sometimes speakers literally ventriloquize the female subject by putting words in her mouth. In other, more subtle instances of females being objectified, speakers endow women with a quality, assign a value to them, or impose their views on them. In Victorian poetry there is a noticeable pattern of women being reduced to a fixed meaning as opposed to being treated as complex human beings”. (Representations of the Female Voice in Victorian Poetry). So we conclude that Victorian women do not really physically appear because males put words in female’s mouth, I mean, actually females do not speak or express what they want by themselves but a male does that job for them.

Robert Browning has created a lunatic man who is not only in love, but is obsessed with Porphyria, to the point that he kills her to keep her by his side forever.

The poem may cause confusion when reading the first lines, but one quickly realizes what the poem is about when continue reading. It starts describing what the weather like is, “The rain set early tonight/the sullen wind was soon awake/it tore…” (lines 1 and 2). I think that the narrator is trying to create a sad atmosphere to treat the theme of love. Reading the poem twice we can have a good idea of who and what he is talking about. This might be because of the vocabulary used, which is easy to understand despite some words that can be more difficult. The title of the poem also helps to set a clear “topic”, because we realize who is going to talk and what is he going to say, although while we are analyzing “Phorphyria’s Lover”, many surprises start coming out. Although the poem does not have a scheme that shows it divided into stanzas, we can see the form of a patterned verse, rhyming ABABB.

As I said before, we are introduced to the poem by the speaker’s description of the weather at that moment, with words that make us create in our minds a cold, stormy, windy and sad landscape. This landscape changes when Porphyria enters into the speaker’s narration. She starts taking off some of the dripping clothes she is wearing to show her white and smooth shoulder on which later the speaker will lean on. We can say that an insinuation of sex is shown here. “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.” (Spark notes: Robert Browning’s Poetry. “Porphyria’s lover”).

From line 15 on, the speaker demonstrates to the reader how Porphyria has fallen in love with him. From my point of view, this is the moment in which two interpretations can be made.

On one hand, we have the lunatic man that invents or imagines the love that Porphyria is feeling, because that is all his desire, but he knows very well that that is not the truth about her feelings. He ends killing her; he strangles Porphyria with her own hair. After murdering her, he tries to convince himself that she has felt no pain, although he cannot really know that because she is already dead.

On the other hand we also have the same lunatic man and Porphyria, who are in love with each other, but maybe because of the different social classes that they belong to, they cannot be together, and the only way of keeping her by his side is killing her. Here, the speaker looks sincere in his words about the no pain she felt, this might be because he thinks that Porphyria would also have wanted to keep him by his side forever.

Anyway, in both cases we can see a disturbed speaker, a lunatic man, a dramatic end, although his actions seem to be quite planified in his mind. Through the poem we can notice many phases and feelings of the human that has fallen in love: desire, fear, happiness, tenderness, egoism, sadness, sensuality, instinct, passion, scorn, love, hate….

The poem in its whole reveals the mad situation of a lunatic man who has fallen in love and finishes killing his “love by love”.

This poem is a clear example of treatment to women in the Victorian period. Women were to hold all the parts of the family, being the most important in it. They did not have the same rights as men. “A wealthy wife was supposed to spend her time reading, sewing, receiving guests, going visiting, letter writing, seeing to the servants and dressing for the part as her husband's social representative.” (A Woman’s Place in Victorian Society- Social and Fashion history).

“She walks in beauty” was written by George Gordon, Lord Byron. It is also a love poem, but here, Lord Byron expresses how beautiful is the woman he is talking about. “She walks in beauty” belongs to the Romantic period, and differs from “Porphyria’s lover”, because Lord Byron describes the beauty of his cousin and not of the woman he has fallen in love with, although the reader might think that he is really in love with the woman he describes: “Whether it is a true declaration of love or a statement of admiration (of her beauty) is left to the reader, since it's known that this poem was about his cousin, Mrs. Wilmot, whom he met at a party in a mourning dress of spangled black.” (CPP – She walks in beauty – Lord Byron).

The poem shows a patterned group of three verses, each one rhyming ABABAB. This gives the poem a melodic tone that makes its reading nicer and easier.

At the beginning of the poem, the speaker makes a comparison between the night and the beauty of the lady, making a contradiction using the darkness and the brightness of the night, because although night and darkness are closely linked we can read that the sky is cloudless and with lots of stars, and that makes it “bright”. Lord Byron refers to the lady’s eyes that give tenderness to the light.

Although Lord Byron writes about the beauty of the woman throughout the whole poem, in the second verse he enhances her beauty: “This conveys the romantic idea that her inner beauty is mirrored by her outer beauty. Her thoughts are serene and sweet. She is pure and dear.” (“She Walks in Beauty”, A discussion of the poem by Lord Byron).

The beauty that Lord Byron talks about in the poem not only refers to the physical beauty but also to the woman’s interior, her personality and her looks. In Romanticism the author flees from the outside pure beauty to find the interior movement. In this poem, Lord Byron shows this expression with a sentimental and some time desperate tone, describing the landscape and comparing it with the figure (the woman).

Lord Byron shows evidence of the power of emotion; I think that he tries to hide his feelings towards the woman, because she is his cousin. As we saw in “Porphyria’s Lover”, the author explicitly shows the love he feels towards the women, how he falls in love with her physic and how crazy he is for it. However, I think that in “She walks in beauty”, the author hides the love he feels, and he gives a very different treatment to women. In my opinion I think that women treatment and love is much more pure in Romanticism than in the Victorian period.

The reasons of all this changes are that Romanticism was like a liberation in literature, music, painting….allowing artistic freedom: “   The Romantic era was a period of great change and emancipation. While the Classical era had strict laws of balance and restraint, the Romantic era moved away from that by allowing artistic freedom, experimentation, and creativity”. (The Romantic era).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Representations of the Female Voice in Victorian Poetry. Breanna Byecroft '05, English 151, Brown University, Autumn 2003

http://victorianweb.org/authors/ebb/byecroft14.html

2. (Spark notes: Robert Browning’s Poetry. “Porphyria’s lover”). Visited 12 January 2008.

http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/browning/section1.html

3. (A woman’s place in Victorian society- Social and Fashion history). Pauline Weston Thomas. Visited 13 January 2008.

http://www.fashion-era.com/a_womans_place.htm

4. (CPP – She walks in beauty – Lord Byron). Last Modified 21 December 2007. Visited 10 January 2008.

http://poetrypages.lemon8.nl/romance/shewalks/shewalks.htm

5. (“She Walks in Beauty”, A discussion of the poem by Lord Byron). Gamber, Garry. Last Modified 3 June 2005. Visited 11 January 2008.

http://ezinearticles.com/?She-Walks-In-Beauty,-A-Discussion-of-the-Poem-by-Lord-Byron&id=80761

6. (The Romantic era). Oracle Education Foundation. Visited 10 January 2008.

http://library.thinkquest.org/15413/history/history-rom.htm

7. (Woman in the Victorian era – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). Wikimedia Foundations. Last modified 12 January 2008. Visited 12 January 2008.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_Victorian_Era

8. (Romanticism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). Wikimedia Foundations. Last modified 10 January 2008. Visited 11 January 2008.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism