Poetic Narrator Of Porphyria's Lover

Porphyria’s Lover

Porphyria’s Lover is the first short dramatic monologue poem of Robert Browning. It was published in the January 1836. This poem deals with the anormal physchology of mankind that’s why it was really popular in Victorian age. Because Porphyria’s Lover is a unique and a gothic poem. The narrator is talking by himself in the poem. Therefore, the speech situation is first person narrator. In this poem, the poet narrated how he killed his lover who has high standart of living than him. It is about love, obsession and a murder. He killed his lover by strangling her with her long hairs. It is weird that he told in the poem that this murder is approved by god. The poetic persona has a sick physchology in the poem. What poetic persona believes that, because of that he killed her, now she belongs to him for ever. That’s how he perceives love. The poem is complicated but it is easier to read because it has written like a story. The dark athmosphere of the poem reflects the anormal physchology of the poetic persona.

The poem starts in the house of an anonymous speaker who sits alone on a stormy night. His lover Porphyria appears out of the rain. She takes her cloths off and starts to light the fireplace. She sits down to comfort her lover. Her lover understands how much she loves him and how much she cares about him. She looks after him and she offers herself to him. Therefore he thinks that she is too weak for him to fall in love. He strangles her. He opens her eyes, unwraps the hair from her neck and spends rest of his night by hugging to her corpse.

The Porphyria’s Lover has written with a Iambic tentameter. In Iambic tentameter one unstressed syllable followes a stressed syllable. In the poem two ...

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...e poem. The word and emphasized the meaning. It helped the poet to complete his rhymes. We can see a simile in line 43. “As a shut bud that holds a bee”. The Porphyria’s closed eye is compared with a bud. There is a synecdoche in line 52 and 53. The smiling rosy little head, So glad it has its utmost will. The “head” represents Porphyria. It referred to the whole. Finally, there is an onomatopoeia in line 21. “Murmuring how she loved me.”

Porphyria’s Lover is one of the poems which i had fun while reading and analyzing it. The poet has a different style of writing. The main themes about love, obsession and murder made the poem more interesting to read even though it is creepy. Robert Browning did a good job with using appropriate poetic devices in the adequate places. He used all of them when it is necessary. This made me encouraged to read his other poems.