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Porphyria’s Lover
Setting
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Isolated setting​ that Porphyria must ‘come through wind and rain’ to reach = she clearly
loves him
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Pathetic fallacy of the ’rain’ and ‘sullen wind’ that ‘tore’ down trees and ‘vex[ed] the lake’
sets a foreboding tone reflecting the dark initial mood and inner turmoil of narrator and
suggesting their love was doomed from the start
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)
conveys an aptly spiteful tone
The cottage, once Porphyria ‘glide[s]’ and makes it ‘warm’ is thus seen as a safe and
welcoming space, which thus contrasts with the cold act of murder
...

- Browning portrays a double perspective through the imagery ‘Laugh’d the blue eyes
without a stain’ and ‘Blush’d bright’ which convey a sense of life and happiness on the
narrator’s part, however Browning’s characterisation of the speaker as psychotic
encourages the reader to see his bias and understand these images in the context of a
body after it has been strangled- i
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red
The ​line lengths​ are short which coupled with the one verse structure and enjambment,
creates a breathlessly overwhelming flow of thought, perhaps to reflect the speaker’s
reckless thinking ‘I found/ A thing to do and all her hair/ In one yellow string I wound/ Three
times her little throat around’ ^ immediate action after thought, same line ​∴​ No time to
think through the consequences
Rhyme scheme​ is ABABB- regularity reflective of speaker’s need to control, however since
the enjambment and changing meter disallows for a monotonous or well-balanced rhythm,
his reckless insanity seeps through
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Cyclical structure:
- From ‘made her smooth white shoulder bare […] stooping, made my cheek lie there’
with rep
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- Likewise the reversal of power is shown through the puppetry with ‘She put my arm
around her waist’ contrasted with ‘I propp’d her head up as before’ as now it is the
speaker who arranges her limp body
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The Nature of the Crime(s)
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Sudden and violent -‘And strangled her
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Above jux
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Strangulation is a very intimate and forceful action- the
violence of which is omitted
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Spontaneity of murder suggests crime of passion but the casual tone of ‘I found/A thing to
do’ subverts this idea since he remains calm and unremorseful throughout, disallowing for
any genuine justification
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The transgression from social expectations by having an illicit affair can be seen as social
crime- ‘set its struggling passion free/ From pride, and vainer ties dissever’

The Criminal + Narrative Voice (Inc
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Poss
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His focus on her
throughout as well as the title itself, where he is the ‘lover’ shows his reliance on her
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- However he attempts to show some empathy through his ‘I am quite sure she felt no
pain’, yet Browning emphasises how this is merely for self-assurance through his
repetition of the statement ‘No pain felt she’ and the use of the adverb ‘quite’ to show a
tentative self-assurance which makes this an unconvincing assertion
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His desire for her to be fully in his control is evident from the use of
‘give’ which connotes possessive use, as well as the use of ‘for ever’ which demonstrates

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his obsession with her being exclusively his
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Structurally at this point, since nothing else as strong has
been requested, Browning builds up to the violent murder subtly, since one could at this
point just take this as a very pure and longed for love, reflecting the speaker’s ability in
having hid true nature under his love for Porphyria for so long, perhaps raising ideas
about the psychopaths that live amongst us
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​∴​ his immediate motive is to preserve
that ‘perfectly pure and good’ perception of Porphyria forever
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- The speaker also seems to justify his actions through supposedly fulfilling Porphyria’s
‘darling one wish’ – ‘all it scorn’d at once is fled/And I, its love, am gain’d instead’ as if it
were a consensual act of generous ingenuity
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Morals and Guilt
- Motivated by self-interest, imposition of his own will onto victim ‘Her darling on wish’
and therefore perhaps is governed by his own code of morals, since he doesn’t explicitly
show his motives to be governed by self-interest, instead referring to ‘Her darling one
wish’ and ‘its utmost will’ suggesting a need to appear selfless, yet through the
egotistical suggestion that ‘I, its love, am gain’d instead’ is the epitome of her desire,
Browning indicates his psychopathic inability to emotionally engage with Porphyria
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- This lack of outward guilt is most poignant in the last line of the poem, wherein the
narrator has gained further confidence, expressed by emphatic ‘And yet God has not
said a word!’
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One the other hand it could show his absolute confidence in his own
morality, as a kind of retort to societies strict rules to which he has found a loophole
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- Perhaps more so in the Victorian era may some have seen Porphyria’s sexual
progressiveness (‘made her smooth white shoulder bare’) as troublingly transgressive
and therefore immoral, however Browning’s careful presentation of her duality
challenges idea that sex and purity are mutually exclusive, and furthermore since the
setting is presented as private and ‘warm’, the initial impression was perhaps more
titillating than immoral
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Suffering)
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Duality
- Browning characterises Porphyria with a certain duality which affords her a greater
depth than the victims in My Last Duchess and The Laboratory
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‘soil’d’ connotes
being tainted
- Her dominance within the relationship is made clear through her arrangement of the
speaker’s body and ‘stooping’ to his physical level, but also on a class level, since her
‘pride’ and ‘vainer ties’ allude to her higher class status
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- However one could argue that her promiscuity is punished since ultimately she dies at
the hands of a forbidden love
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Suffering
- This vulnerability increases her victim status but more naturally does her murder in
which her suffering is glossed over by the speaker who insists ‘she felt no pain’
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Whilst little
sympathy is given to the victim by the criminal, Browning affords some through her
magnified innocence
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In this respect he diminishes her suffering through his
subtle dehumanisation of her from passionate lover to passive object of love
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Browning, through his use of an isolated setting that they may never
be found, especially since their love was presumably kept hidden due Porphyria’s ‘vainer
ties’ and thus Browning leaves the justice up to the reader, who serves as judge over the
criminal acts
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Perhaps the strict class boundaries are seen as a source of injustice, since it forces them to
keep their love restricted, only occasionally satisfies when ‘passion would sometimes
prevail’
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Plotting
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The speaker’s plotting is quick and improvised in the moment ‘I debated what to do’, yet
unlike a crime of passion, which is a crime done rashly in the heat of the moment, the
speaker remains casual despite his spontaneity, simply having ‘found a thing to do’- the
vagueness of the abstract noun ‘thing’ intensifying the juxtaposition to the specific cruelty of
strangulation
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Love
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Love is presented as dangerous when obsessive and when the partners in the relationship
have different commitments to it
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Love is
seen as a motive for the speaker’s act of murder but not, as usually in presentations of
domestic violence, as revengeful or with anger, but with the still deluded justification of
serving his lover’s ‘utmost will’ and contributing to their happy relationship now he is ‘gain’d
instead’ of her privileged lifestyle

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