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Porphyria’s Analysis

“Porphyria’s Lover”: a different poem. A poem which breaks with the idea of poem we always have seen up to now. Usually a poem describes the own feelings, the own sadness, the own happiness, the own desperation… It describes what do you want from the own perspective, from the subjectivity. But this poem not, this poem is told in an objective way, it is like a real story in verse, a story, or better, a real situation in a poem, in a period, where poems reflected everything less a murder.  

At the beginning you know the character is remembering what he did it as a beautiful memory. You can imagine the scene as you are in the house, in the place he is telling you what happened with details, in a romantic tone through the nine firsts verses, a draw from the Romantic poetry of the earlier nineteenth century. But in the line 10, when the man starts to speak about her clothes the background changes, we enter in a Victorian tone.

He continues explaining each detail, each movement she makes, he is observing with attention, with incredible attention. This man enjoys the moment, he likes that moment he has lived with his woman and he doesn’t want to forget it, he doesn’t want that moment changes, he wants the moment remains (something impossible because, paradoxically, only the change is constant). And his solve? To freeze the moment killing her. He wraps her neck with her hair and strangles her. She is saying him she loves him, weak, sweetly… and he kills her because prefer passion prevail, as we can see from line 21 to line 26:

20     And spread, o'er all, her yellow hair,

Murmuring how she loved me--she

Too weak, for all her heart's endeavor,

To set its struggling passion free

From pride, and vainer ties dissever,

25     And give herself to me forever.

But passion sometimes would prevail,

Browning makes an incredible job through the poem, because you can see how the man is savouring the instants, a man without a sense of consciousness; you can see a psychopath’s mind, a man that is able to kill his partner for remaining the idea of love he likes and his woman showed him.

From the beginning or lines 9 or 10, we can feel as something strange is going to pass, because he is describing in a beautiful but strange way the moment. The next verses are ones of the best to show it this mad man :

35     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

40     Three times her little throat around,

And strangled her. No pain felt she; 

I am quite sure she felt no pain.

“No pain felt she” (line 41) he says with incredible with one’s mind at ease and he continues “I am quite sure she felt no pain” (line 42) if in the case you doubt it or his mind doubt it.

He, after that, to have kill Porphyria thinks she is now completely for him, and he can do whatever he wants to do, and having killed her (an action that with a minimal of consciousness is a terrible fact) he decided “to play” with her died body.  He plays with her eyes, with her neck, with her head… It’s a macabre image: in a house a man has killed a woman, and after he is playing with her like if she was a dolly while he is remembering the night.  Can you imagine a living-room where there are a man and a woman sat together? He is happy. She is dead. It’s terrible.

At the end he says: “And yet God has not said a word!” (line 60). As saying: I have been bad and nobody will punish me, not even God.

With that poem we can see an example of one of Browning’s ideas: “his denunciation of man’s ratiocinative intellect as the corrupting organ, his casuistical poems are ingenious analyses of men and women who are essentially good at heart but have gone wrong in the head” (extracted from: “Luis Cernuda and the modern English poets”, Chapter 2: Cernuda and Browning by Brian Hughes).

As we can read on Wikipedia:

“Browning’s fame today rests mainly on his dramatic monologues, in which the words not only convey setting and action but also reveal the speaker’s character. Unlike a soliloquy, the meaning in a Browning dramatic monologue is not what the speaker directly reveals but what he inadvertently "gives away" about himself in the process of rationalizing past actions, or "special-pleading" his case to a silent auditor in the poem.” “Porphyria’s Lover” is a good example.

References:

-                  “Luis Cernuda and the modern English poets”, Chapter 2: Cernuda and Browning, Brian Hughes, Univ. de Alicante.

-                  http://www.englishverse.com/poems/porphyrias_lover - A site with English poems.

-                  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Browning - The Wikipedia.

-                  http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/browning/context.html - Sparnotes, where you can find study guides about different topics.