Porphyrias Lover, My Last Duchess and The Flea all have the theme of

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Porphyrias Lover, My Last Duchess and The Flea all have the theme of

love in them

Porphyrias Lover, My Last Duchess and The Flea all have the theme of

love in them. But they are not all the same theme of love for example

Porphyrias Lover is obsessive and seductive love whereas; The Flea is

more like sexual love. Robert Browning writes both Porphyrias Lover

and My Last Duchess and John Donne writes The Flea. I think

Porphyrias Lover and My Last Duchess are alike as Robert Browning uses

similar themes of love in them e.g. Obsessive and Possessive. The

Flea is a completely different poem altogether. It is more of a

sexual poem rather than obsessive but it could be argued that it is

obsessive as well because the male is obsessed with having sex with

the lady.

Porphyrias Lover is about a man obsessing over Porphyria, who is

already with someone else, Porphyria seduces him and tells him that

she loves him- ‘She put my arm about her waist, and made her smooth

white shoulder bare and all her yellow hair displaced…. Murmuring how

she loved me’. Her lover then realises Porphyria loves him and he

debates what to do, he then thinks of something to do that will make

Porphyria his forever, ‘and all her hair in one yellow string I wound

three times her little throat around and strangled her.’ He killed

Porphyria and is happy and confident about what he has done ‘And thus

we sit together now, and all night long we have not stirred, and yet

God has not said a word!’ Porphyrias Lover is a Dramatic Monologue in

which and obsessive lover kills his mistress. Robert Browning uses

personification an pathetic fallacy to set the mood of the lover, ‘

The sullen wind was soon awake, it tore the elm- tops down for spite,

and d...

... middle of paper ...

...to be killed because she smiled at other

men, ‘ Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt, whene’er I passed her, but who

passed without much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands; then

all smiles stopped together.

This poem is like Porphyrias Lover because is contains possessive love

and so does Porphyrias lover. I don’t think it is like The Flea

because it has no seductive love in it at all. I think this could be

down to the fact that Porphyrias Lover and My Last Duchess are both

written by Robert Browning and so they will be written in a certain

style of writing. The Flea however is written by John Donne and is

slightly different to both the other poems!

I enjoyed studying these types of love poetry because I thought it was

interesting how there are so many types of love. I think I have shown

that all the poems are related to each other in different ways.

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