Beyond is back to take you through AQA GCSE Poetry in preparation for English Literature Paper 2. Eagle-eyed readers will note that our previous posts dealt with Power and Conflict, so we were pretty keen to balance that out with Love and Relationships. This blog explores Porphyria’s Lover by Robert Browning, covering:
- Porphyria’s Lover context
- The significance of the poem’s title
- Porphyria’s Lover structure
- Porphyria’s Lover analysis
Grab your notebooks, clear your mind and let’s go through Porphyria before the narrator finishes her off for good…
Porphyria’s Lover context
‘Porphyria’s Lover’ is a poem by the English Victorian poet, Robert Browning. Robert Browning became one of the foremost poets of the Victorian period and is equally well remembered for his love affair and marriage with the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Robert Browning wrote for the stage before turning to poetry and his most famous poems are dramatic monologues, a dramatic form in which one character speaks for an extended period of time.
‘Porphyria’s Lover’ expresses the longing and dangerous desire of the narrator for the woman named Porphyria. Porphyria is actually a disease that can result in madness. Porphyria’s Lover certainly makes some very strange and deadly choices in the poem and the reader is left to wonder if Porphyria is real or the figment of a diseased mind. The poem was published in 1836 after all…
Robert Browning
Robert Browning (1812-1889) was an English poet, playwright and altogether dreary-looking Victorian gent…it must’ve been the camera lenses of the time…
Browning began his career as a playwright but soon realised that his expertise lay in writing long dramatic poems…lucky you.
He developed the form of poetry known as the dramatic monologue for a Victorian audience and became one of the most loved Victorian poets.
Robert Browning married the older poet, Elizabeth Barrett, in 1846. They had met in 1845 and conducted their courtship in secret, knowing that Barrett’s father would disapprove. During this period Barrett wrote her famous Sonnets from the Portuguese, a series of love poems to Browning.
When they married in 1846, Elizabeth Barrett’s father disinherited her. He had done this to all of his children who chose to marry. The couple moved to Italy and lived there until Barrett
died in 1861.
Context summary:
- Porphyria’s Lover’ is a poem by the English Victorian poet, Robert Browning.
- Robert Browning became one of the foremost poets of the Victorian period.
- Porphyria’s Lover’ expresses the longing and dangerous desire of the narrator for the woman named Porphyria.
- The poem is a dramatic monologue.
Porphyria’s Lover: The Title
The title ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ immediately introduces this element of madness. By naming the loved one ‘Porphyria’ Browning has perhaps explained his narrator’s issues early on. The title then gives us the nature of our narrator – we are never told his own name and he is shown in the poem only in connection with Porphyria. It is as if he does not exist without her.
Title summary:
- The title ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ immediately introduces an element of madness.
- The title then gives us the nature of our narrator – we are never told his own name and he is shown in the poem only in connection with Porphyria. It is as if he does not exist without her.
Porphyria’s Lover structure
The poem is a dramatic monologue whose narrator is clearly suffering from some type of mental disorder. The poem is a dramatic monologue spoken by the narrator. It is through him that all the ideas and action of the story are told to us. This makes us question at times his reliability as the narrator of his story and we wonder, by the end, how much of what he tells us is actually true.
The poem has a steady and regular rhythm reflecting the outer calmness of the narrator as he relays his story. This is tempered by the asymmetrical rhyme scheme (ABABB) however which shows lack of control. Through the poem’s structural form we see the narrator’s two sides fighting for dominance – will the madness erupt and take over or will the narrator be able to tell his tale without breaking down?
The poem is in two halves – the first in which Porphyria is the active participant of the drama. Although she has no voice of her own in the poem, Porphyria is highly active in the first part of the poem, shutting ‘out the cold’ and manoeuvring the narrator about like a puppet: ‘stooping, made my cheek lie there’. In the second half however, Porphyria becomes the puppet – the speaker strangles her with her own hair and then props up her head. Nice. The narrator makes specific mention of this reversal: ‘Only, this time my shoulder bore/ Her head, which droops upon it still’.
Structure summary:
- The poem is a dramatic monologue spoken by the narrator.
- The poem has a steady and regular rhythm reflecting the outer calmness of the narrator as he relays his story.
- This is tempered by the asymmetrical rhyme scheme (ABABB).
- The poem is in two halves – the first in which Porphyria is the active participant of the drama. The second in which Porphyria becomes the puppet – the speaker strangles her with her own hair and then props up her head! Owch…
Porphyria’s Lover analysis
Key vocabulary
- Tress: A long section of hair
- Dissever: To break off
- Prevail: To win or succeed
- Vex: To annoy
- Oped: Opened
The poem deals with feelings of longing and desire. It opens with the use of pathetic fallacy, using the natural world to display the narrator’s feelings as he awaits Porphyria. The wind ‘tore the elm-tops down’ and vexed the lake, just as the narrator’s longing causes a tumult of emotions within him as he waits for the woman to arrive. The speaker is shown to be at an emotional breaking point as she enters: his heart is ‘fit to break’ as he wonders what she will be like with him, what she will say, whether she will love him.
As Porphyria enters the narrator describes her actions in minute detail as he follows her with his eyes about the room. In a trance-like way he describes his lover’s physical features, the use of the word ‘And’ at the beginning of each line here perhaps representing the building up of feeling within the narrator as he watches her. In this section, the narrator is the observer while Porphyria acts. She brings with her a sense of magic: she ‘glided in’ and domesticity: ‘she shut the cold out’ and ‘made the cheerless grate/ Blaze up’.
There is repetition of ‘her yellow hair’ indicating that this is a thing of obsession for the narrator and foreshadowing what will happen later. The narrator is quite critical of the way Porphyria, perhaps from a higher class or social standing, has behaved with him. She has not known her own mind in the past and this troubles the speaker. He references her ‘murmuring’ how she loves him, as though she isn’t quite convinced of it herself and he calls her ‘weak’.
When, at last, it becomes clear to him that Porphyria loves him and that his longing and patience has been rewarded he takes the drastic and unforeseen step of killing her. It is clear from the repetition of the words ‘mine, mine’ that the narrator wishes to possess Porphyria entirely and realises that the only way to keep this moment forever is to make it the last moment that Porphyria has. Longing and desire have become deadly. There is a chilling matter of fact quality about the way he explains the killing: he ‘found/ A thing to do’ as though it were the most natural occurrence in the world, an after-thought. The use of her ‘yellow hair’ to effect the killing reflects the obsession with this part of her that we had seen previously.
We are left wondering, as the reader, whether the events of the poem actually take place as the narrator tells them. As soon as we see him refer to ‘I am quite sure she felt no pain’ we begin to re-evaluate the worth of all of the statements he has uttered. For example, did Porphyria really enter the cottage and declare her love for him or did she in fact reject him and he killed her for this. Perhaps he reimagines the events of the evening to suit him since he is now the only one who knows the truth…yikes.
Analysis summary:
- The poem deals with feelings of longing and desire.
- Pathetic fallacy is used to describe the narrator’s tumultuous emotions.
- Porphyria is described with magical qualities. She ‘glided in’ and domesticity: ‘she shut the cold out.’
- There is repetition of ‘her yellow hair’ indicating that this is a thing of obsession for the narrator and foreshadowing what will happen later.
- It is clear from the repetition of the words ‘mine, mine’ that the narrator wishes to possess Porphyria entirely and realises that the only way to keep this moment forever is to make it the last moment that Porphyria has.
Porphyria’s Lover Lesson Pack from Beyond
Explore even more set texts from the AQA GCSE English syllabus here.