A Literary Analysis Of Porphyria's Lover

3 Pages 742 Words

The Demented Mind of Porphyria’s Lover



Audience: Person’s interested in learning more about Robert Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover.”
Purpose: To Educate.
Proposal: I will tell you my interpretation of Robert Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover.”
Tone: Objective
Constraints: The poem is from the nineteenth century which brings a whole new aspect to some of the customs in dating and life.

The Demented Mind of Porphyria’s Lover

Is it truly love if you would kill your lover so you can be together forever? Sounds like dementia, does it not? In Robert Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover” the speaker of the poem kills his lover. He does this because he fears she will go back to her family and leave him. He believes that if he kills her they will be together happily ever after.
From the beginning of the poem there is a feeling that something is wrong, a rainy windy night when trees are getting blown down. Then Porphyria comes home to her lover and, in his eyes “She shut the cold out and the storm” (7). The speaker of this poem views Porphyria as somebody who can make everything okay. She also brings happiness and warmth to his life. This is symbolized in the fact that she “made the cheerless grate/ Blaze up, and all the cottage warm” (8).
Throughout the first twenty five lines of the poem the anaphora “And” is used to emphasize Porphyria’s life and her caring actions. It is always used to begin a line where she is doing something for the speaker. However, there is a volta at the beginning of line twenty six “But passion sometimes would prevail” (26). Here a negative attitude is emitted by the speaker and this anaphora ends, at least until after Porphyria is dead. After starting a fire and warming the cottage Porphyria removed all of her wet clothing and sits beside her lover. At this point she is talking to him but there is no response. This is probably because he is already contemplat...