Porphyria's lover

1. Context

1.1. Robert Browning (1812-1889) was a Victorian poet.

1.2. He married another poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who was rather more popular and successful than him.

1.3. Was one of the first of his poems to feature a character with psychosis.

1.4. The woman in the poem is named after a disease called Porphyria. It is a rare type of disease, which can result in madness of some kind.

2. Subject matter

2.1. The poem is a narrative of a murder, told calmly and callously. On a stormy night the apparently depressed narrator is sitting alone in a cold and dark cottage.

2.2. . Out of the storm the girl he loves, Porphyria, arrives and makes up the fire.

2.3. He is delighted to discover that she loves him. In that perfect moment he decides to kill her, strangling her with her own hair.

2.4. When she is dead he props her up on his shoulder in the same position as before. There they sit for the whole night.

3. Form And Structure

3.1. Porphyria’s Lover is a dramatic monologue written in the first person. The regular rhyme scheme follows an ABABB pattern throughout.

3.2. There is a mirrored structure to the events in the poem. In the first half, Porphyria arranges the narrator’s physical form, putting his "arm about her waist". After he has killed her, he arranges her back in the position in which she had been sitting.

4. imagery

4.1. The poem opens with a strong sense of pathetic fallacy.

4.2. Porphyria’s "yellow hair" is a recurring image in the poem.

4.3. When she is alive, Porphyria is pale, with her "smooth white shoulder bare". Once he had killed her, her cheek "blushed bright" on her "smiling rosy little head". This seems in line with the narrator’s belief that he has given Porphyria what she wanted by killing her.