Porphyria's Lover Essay

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Porphyria’s Lover Robert Browning’s Poem is a dramatic narrative about a murder. The poem is about violent love affairs. The narrators repetition of the word love exactly 4 times seems to have many meanings behind it. The word love mainly comes from Porphyria, the narrators lover. She is saying it as an affirmation that she is indeed in love with him. His behavior in the poem is psychotic and murderous. It appears that he is in a situation where he is being the one dominated in a the sexual relationship. He thinks that Porphyria doesn’t love him until she bares her shoulder to him and the rest of her body as she proceeds to lay her “smiling rosy little head” on him (52). The poem has many restriction binaries. One being in how porphyria is being restricted on how she acts toward her lover and another is how the lover is restricting her after he murders her with her own blonde hair. …show more content…

“No pain felt she” (line 41). The pain that she would have felt was the one that he caused out of his violent love. Choking is seen as a norm in sexual encounters these days that it is taken as a form of lust and love rather than violence. He liked her better when he was in charge of her body and was now the one dominating a still body where they once sat alive and happy, which seems ironic. He sat there quietly when she said that she loved him, even though he felt the same way he had a different way of showing it. Browning uses these opposing binaries to showcase the similarities between them for example; love to pain, cheerless to happy and passion to

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