Exploration of Different Types of Love in Poetry

Exploration of Different Types of Love in Poetry

'Porphyria's lover and 'My Last Duchess' are both poems written my

Robert Browning. Both poems describe the behaviour of two people who

are in love and both poems are narrated from a male's lover point of

view. They are both dramatic monologues and in both poems the women

are killed.

Porphyria's Lover is a poem about a dramatic insight of an abnormally

possessive lover. The lover takes extreme action to immortalize his

love. He starts by describing the weather which reflects his own mood.

The mood is bleak and nature is describing the character's feelings.

'The rain set early in tonight,

The sullen wind was soon awake,

It tore the elm-tops down for spite

And did its worst to vex the lake.'

The weather is linked to human emotion showing how malicious and

spiteful the character is. The atmosphere is cold, raining and there

is a storm raging outside a small cottage. Words like 'sullen',

'spite' and 'vex' shows the lover is bad tempered.

Porphyria walks in the cottage and immediately brings warmth. Her

lover describes her bringing warmth and cheerfulness metaphorically on

his home and his spirit.

'She shut the cold out and the storm

And kneeled and made the cheerless grate

Blaze up, and all the cottage warm.'

Porphyria shows tenderness and intensity when she starts to seduce her

lover

'She put my arm about her waist

And made her smooth white shoulder bare'

Women in Victorian times were expected to be submissive but Porphyria

makes the first move and seduces her lover.

'That moment she was mine, mine fair'

Porphyria's lover is empha...

... middle of paper ...

... lover kills

her, there is still a tenderness and emotion shown from the lover in

'Porphyria's Lover which is not shown in 'My Last Duchess'. The lover

seems capable of more emotion than the Duke. It was the lover who sat

in the cold cottage in the dreary weather, and 'listened with heart

fit to break' for Porphyria's return. Whereas the Duke only has the

faded memory of his anger and jealousy towards the Duchess. The poem

does not serve as a picture of the Dukes emotions. He is just mocking

his last wife to the emissary.

Throughout the poems irony, rhetorical questions and Euphemisms are

used which soften the truth by putting it in an indirect way. For

example in Porphyria's Lover:

'A thing to do, and all her hair.'

In both poems the main theme is obsessive love which leads to the

murders of both lovers.