Comparing the Male Characters of Porphyria’s Lover and My Last Duchess

Comparing the Male Characters of Porphyria’s Lover and My Last Duchess

The creation of a plausible character within literature is one of the most difficult challenges to a writer, and development to a level at which the reader identifies with them can take a long time. However, through the masterful use of poetic devices and language Browning is able to create two living and breathing characters in sixty or less lines. When one examines these works one has to that they are quite the achievements for they not only display the persona’s of two distinct men but also when compared show large differences while dealing with essentially the same subject.

A brief examination of the structural aspects of “Porphyria’s Lover” is needed before further analysis is done. One can break the poem up into twelve stanzas with an ababb stanzaic rhyme structure, though it is most often printed as a block poem. This would make it an alternately rhymed quatrain with a fifth line attached to create a couplet ending. The majority of the lines contain four iambic feet, though a few are nonasyllabic. Five of the twelve stanzas spill into the next stanza, thus detracting from their free-standing integrity. These stanzas are not syntactically self-containing and therefore the end-couplet value is undercut. If we examine the end of the eighth stanza we see that there is enjambment into the ninth stanza. In one long yellow string I wound, Three times her little throat around, And strangled her. (Browning, Porphyria’s Lover”, Lines 39-41) This does detract from the couplet though it emphasizes the tone, making the understated nature even more sociopathic. This is one example of how this simple tool in itself masterfully accentuates the overall tone of u...

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...em we can learn the nature of love should allow people to conquer class distinction and that marriage should avoid sexist male tendencies. Inadequacy is a feeling that pervades both poems, and is evident through the voices of their protagonists. One can see its horrifying effect immediately. Men need to learn to deal with their possessive and aggressive natures in a way that creates a love that is beneficial to both partners not to just one. Browning, in these works, is painting the side the Romantics before him neglected to.

Works Cited

Browning, Robert, Robert Browning: Selected Poetry, (London: Penguin Books, 1989), pp. 17-8 and 25-6

Burrows, Leonard, Browning the Poet, (Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 1969), pp. 51-61 and 115-121

DeVane, William Clyde, A Browning Handbook, (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc. 1955), pp. 108-9