Porphyria's Lover BY ROBERT BROWNING

 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!

Dramatic Monologue and Robert Browning : 

  Monologue itself simply means a speech delivered by a single character, typically in a play or other dramatic work. It allows the character to express their thoughts, feelings, and motivations directly to the audience.

  Dramatic monologue, however, takes this concept a step further. It's a specific form of poetry where a single speaker addresses a silent listener, revealing their inner world and motivations indirectly. The listener is often implied by the speaker's words and doesn't respond. Tennyson's Ulysses, Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach, T. S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. ALfred Pruffok are some of the examples of the dramatic monologue. 

   Here's where Robert Browning comes in. He's considered a master of the dramatic monologue. He used this form to create vivid portraits of complex characters from all walks of life. Through their monologues, we get a glimpse into their personalities, desires, and the situations they face.

Examples of Browning's Dramatic Monologues:

•  "My Last Duchess" - A Duke speaks to an emissary, hinting at the fate of his deceased wife and revealing his controlling nature.
•  "The Laboratory" - A woman, possibly a scientist, contemplates a dangerous experiment fueled by love and obsession.
•  "Porphyria's Lover" - A man describes smothering his beloved while she sleeps, believing he's preserving her beauty.
•  "Fra Lippo Lippi" - A Renaissance painter defends his art and lifestyle, blurring the lines between the sacred and the secular.

Introduction : 

 "Porphyria's Lover" is a dramatic monologue written by Robert Browning in 1836. It depicts a scene of murder from the perspective of an unnamed male speaker who has killed his lover, Porphyria. The poem enters the mind of the murderer as he coolly recounts his disturbing crime in a shockingly casual and reasoned way. Through vivid imagery, abnormal psychological insights, and an unsettling tone of detachment, Browning crafts a gripping portrait of insanity and obsession. 

 The poem's first-person narration [ Unreliable narrator term coined by William James ] makes the reader an accessory of sorts to the narrator's twisted justifications and horrifying actions. "Porphyria's Lover" exemplifies Browning's mastery of the dramatic monologue form and serves as a chilling study of madness and perverse devotion. 

Summary : 

  The poem opens by setting a storm scene, as Porphyria enters the cottage and starts a fire to warm her estranged lover. In disturbing detail, the narrator describes Porphyria's actions of undressing and letting down her hair in an intimate moment. He grows increasingly obsessive, wishing the moment of her blushing with love for him could last forever. In a shockingly casual line, he reveals "When no voice replied" he strangled Porphyria with her hair to preserve that perfect moment.

  He then positions her body to recreate the earlier peaceful scene, staring at her corpse in deluded admiration. The narrator rationalizes his crime by claiming now her soul and body are perfectly unified in an eternal union of love. The monologue ends with him imagining God has forgiven his actions and this frozen moment with Porphyria's body is closer to heaven than any church worship could provide.

Structure and Rhyme : 

  The poem consists of six sections of varying line lengths connected by an ABABB rhyme scheme. This consistent rhyming creates a songlike, incantatory rhythm that juxtaposes eerily with the disturbing content and images.

  The sections vary from 8 lines to 28 lines in length, mirroring the narrator's fractured mental state and the building intensity as his deranged plans unfold. After the longest 28 line section chronicling the murder, the final section is only 4 lines, reflecting a sense of frightening clarity and finality.

  "Porphyria's Lover" is a poem about love, violence, and control. The speaker kills his lover, Porphyria, even though she seems to be returning his love. Here's a breakdown of the main ideas:

•  Love and Control:
  
  
  
  
  The speaker sees love as completely controlling someone. He kills Porphyria to keep her pure and good in his eyes, even though she's a strong-willed woman at the beginning of the poem.

• Love, Violence, and Control in Porphyria’s Lover

   Robert Browning’s Porphyria’s Lover shows how love, when mixed with obsession, can turn violent. At the beginning, Porphyria is full of energy and independence. She closes the storm outside, lights the fire, and comforts her lover. In this moment, she controls the space. But the speaker wants more than love he wants ownership.

   When he repeats the word “mine, mine”, Browning shows his male possessiveness. This is not love as partnership, but love as control. In the Victorian Age, men were expected to be strong and dominant, while women were supposed to be gentle, submissive, and pure. Porphyria’s strength threatens this order. To fix this, the speaker silences her forever by strangling her with her own hair.

   Sigmund Freud, the famous psychoanalyst, would read this act as the result of repressed desire and neurosis. The man cannot balance his passion with society’s moral rules, so he destroys the source of temptation. Elaine Showalter, a feminist critic, explains how many Victorian texts show women being silenced because their independence frightened men. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), argue that literature often punished women who broke social norms. Porphyria fits this pattern: she dares to express desire, but is punished with death.

  Sexuality, Morality, and Hypocrisy

   The poem also reflects the Christian idea of purity. In the Bible, purity is often linked with chastity and obedience, especially for women. Porphyria expresses passion by visiting her lover at night. For the speaker, this makes her both desirable and dangerous. He kills her to keep her “perfectly pure and good.” He even believes God approves because “God has not said a word.”

   In Indian traditions, purity and duty are also strongly linked to a woman’s role. The ideal woman is expected to be a dutiful daughter, a loyal patni (wife), and a mother who follows rituals and customs. Texts like Manusmriti emphasize obedience to father, husband, and son at different stages of life. Sexual freedom for women was discouraged, and transgression was seen as a threat to family honor.

   So, just like Victorian women, Indian women were bound by patriarchy. If a woman expressed her independent sexuality, she was judged harshly. In both cultures, purity meant silence and obedience, not freedom.

  Male Possessiveness and Patriarchy

  The speaker’s mindset reflects patriarchal thinking: a belief that men must dominate women. For him, Porphyria is not a person but a possession. When she shows independence, he cannot accept it. By killing her, he makes her permanently “his.” This is the extreme form of male possessiveness.

   Modern psychology would call this obsessive love disorder, where the desire to control leads to violence. Feminist scholars like Kate Millett (in Sexual Politics, 1970) argue that patriarchy reduces women to objects of male power. In Browning’s poem, this power takes the shape of murder.

  
  

  1. Victorian role of women – Women were expected to be pure, obedient, and dependent.

  2. Indian traditional role of women – Women were bound to duty as daughter, wife, and mother, and tied to rituals of purity.

  3. The idea of purity – From the Bible and Indian texts, purity often meant sexual control. For the speaker, killing Porphyria keeps her “pure.”

  4. Feminist critique – Scholars like Elaine Showalter and Gilbert & Gubar argue that Porphyria is punished for breaking norms of female silence and submission.

  5. Male possessiveness – The speaker believes love means control. Patriarchy justifies this control, whether in Victorian England or traditional India.

•  This shows the hypocrisy of Victorian morality. Outwardly, society condemned sexuality, but in secret it was fascinated by it. Browning’s readers could enjoy the shocking violence of the poem while also feeling morally safe, since Porphyria is “punished.” Harold Bloom notes that Browning often explored the dark psychology of men, forcing readers to confront their own hidden desires.

 Symbols in "Porphyria's Lover":

•  Cheerless Grate: The fireplace represents warmth, comfort, and home. When Porphyria lights a fire, it shows she's trying to make the place welcoming.

•  Soiled Gloves: These gloves aren't just dirty and wet, they also hint that the speaker thinks Porphyria has done something wrong, maybe even something sexual.

•  Yellow Hair: The speaker is really focused on Porphyria's hair. It can represent her beauty and danger to him. In the end, he uses her hair to strangle her, taking away her power.

•  Gay Feast: Porphyria left a fun party to be with the speaker. This shows she cares about him a lot, but also that she gave up something nice.

  Pale: The speaker describes himself as pale, which can mean he's sick from love, or it can be a symbol of strong desire, like in many love poems.

•   Blush: After killing Porphyria, the speaker sees a blush on her face. He thinks this means she's still beautiful and pure, like he wanted. But it could also be a sign of death.

Figures of Speech in Porphyria’s Lover

1. Personification

   • “The sullen wind was soon awake, / It tore the elm-tops down for spite”
     → The wind is described as angry and spiteful, like a human being.

2. Imagery

   • Strong visual and sensory details: “When glided in Porphyria; straight / She shut the cold out and the storm”, “Made her smooth white shoulder bare”, “And strangled her.”
     → Creates vivid mental pictures of passion, warmth, and violence.

3. Repetition

• “That moment she was mine, mine, fair, / Perfectly pure and good.”
  → Repetition of “mine” shows possessiveness and obsession.

4. Enjambment

   • Sentences flow over multiple lines without pause, mirroring the speaker’s unstable, obsessive thoughts.

5. Contrast / Juxtaposition

   • Warmth inside vs. storm outside.

   • Life vs. death.

   • Passion vs. silence.

Conclusion : 

 Through the unsettling dramatic monologue form, Browning gives chilling psychological insights into the mind of "Porphyria's Lover"'s deranged narrator. His eerily understated and casual depiction of strangulation and corpse absorption creates a tension between the narrator's apparent rationality and his complete detachment from moral sanity.

 By leaving the setting, backstory, and respective social classes of Porphyria and her lover ambiguous, Browning universalizes the tale as an exploration of the darkest human potential for madness and obsession overtaking reason and love. We the readers become implicated in bearing witness to and attempting to understand these disturbed depths of the human psyche.

 With haunting symbolic details like the storm, hair, and fire, Browning crafts a richly atmospheric study of insanity and perverse devotion gone horrifically awry. The poem's sing-song rhythms and melodic language make the narrator's calm, terrifying rationalizations all the more disquieting and memorable. "Porphyria's Lover" leaves an indelible impression as one of Browning's most psychologically probing and chillingly enigmatic poetic tales.

Works Cited :

Browning, Robert. Porphyria’s Lover. 1836. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, 10th ed., vol. 2, W.W. Norton & Company, 2018, pp. 1255–1257.

Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. Harcourt Brace, 1994.

Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. 1905. Translated by James Strachey, Basic Books, 2000.

Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Yale University Press, 1979.

Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics. Doubleday, 1970.

Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton University Press, 1977.