Porphyria's Lover by Robert Browning

First published: 1836, as “Porphyria”; collected as the second of two poems titled “Madhouse Cells,” in Bells and Pomegranates, No. III: Dramatic Lyrics, 1842; subtitled “Porphyria’s Lover” in the collected edition of Poems, 1849

Type of poem: Dramatic monologue

The Poem

“Porphyria’s Lover” is a sixty-line poem of irregular iambic tetrameter with an ababb rhyme scheme, a pattern which continues through the poem’s twelve five-line divisions. It is believed to be Robert Browning’s earliest study in abnormal psychology. It is perhaps more accurately termed a soliloquy or an inner monologue than a dramatic monologue, since it identifies no specific auditor. The term “dramatic” more aptly describes many of Browning’s later poems, in which the tension arises from the drama that builds as the speaker unwittingly reveals himself to a specifically identified listener present in the poem. The fact that Browning called the poem “dramatic” is probably explained by his reaction to reviews that had ridiculed his earliest work as too subjective. After these, he insisted that readers see his poetry as objective by distinguishing between his personal self (the poet) and the voices of his fictive speakers in his monologues. He did not want critics to think these created speakers expressed the poet’s personal emotions.

The title leads one to expect a love relationship, perhaps two lovers in a cozy cottage retreating from the storm described in the opening lines. However, the perceptions reported by the speaker (the “lover”) soon alert the reader to his unbalanced perspective. This speaker attributes attitudes and willful actions to the wind: It is “sullen,” it has torn the elm trees “for spite,” and it has tried to “vex the lake.” These opening lines reveal the speaker as fearful, as a passive listener, and as one who seems to project his own emotions onto the external world. He appears to be an unreliable reporter.

He then describes the entrance of Porphyria, whose actions and words contrast with the speaker’s passivity: She has “come through wind and rain” to “shut the cold out and the storm.” She then warms the cottage, an action that the speaker has lacked the will to perform for himself. He seems to lack any awareness that he has a will or a voice of his own: He reports that his arm and his cheek are placed by Porphyria around her waist and on her shoulder. He seems to experience himself as being without an active, directing center of his own being, since he has only “debated” possible action, being too engrossed in his own feelings to initiate action. When he can finally act, prompted apparently by a drive to preserve the moment of Porphyria’s surrender to him, he murders her by strangling her with her own hair. In the remaining lines, the speaker clinically describes opening Porphyria’s eyelids, loosening her hair around her neck, kissing her dead cheek, and propping her head on his shoulder in an act that mimics her earlier placement of his head. As he had projected his own attitudes and emotions onto the external storm in the opening lines, he concludes by attributing his murderous act to Porphyria’s “utmost will” and “one wish.” The final line suggests a complete lack of conscience in the speaker: “And yet God has not said a word!”

Forms and Devices

Browning’s forte and his principal formal strategy in this early poem is a monologue through which an unaware speaker reveals character disorders. It is the speaker’s diction and syntax as he reports his perceptions and inferences that reveal his moral character. The first four lines are simple, flat, four-measure statements, end-stopped and regular in meter until the spondee of line 5, “heart fit.” After the speaker’s personification of the wind, which suggests his own helplessness and suppressed emotions, the ambiguous grammar of the emphatic spondee suggests both a heart ready to break and a heart that is having a fit. Lines 6-15, which describe Porphyria’s movements, are correspondingly more fluid, with enjambment and midline clause breaks. The effect is a contrast between Porphyria’s action and the speaker’s unmoving passivity. Lines 15-30 show the speaker overcome by Porphyria’s presence. He has lost even the weak “I” of line 5 and has become so dissociated from himself that he reports his inability to reply to Porphyria’s call as “no voice” being heard, as though he is outside himself listening. The word “displaced” (line 18) suggests the displacement of the speaker’s center of being, a kind of moral paralysis. This self-alienation continues with the speaker’s sense that Porphyria is the one who moves his arm and head. The word “stooping” (line 19) is, again, grammatically ambiguous, this time as a dangling modifier, since the speaker, not Porphyria, is the one who must bend over to reach her shoulder (line 31 shows that he is the one who must look upward). Lines 22-25 seem to indicate the speaker’s judgment more than Porphyria’s “murmuring,” as they continue his merging, or confusing, of their identities.

Still seeing himself through Porphyria’s eyes, the speaker regains his sense of “I” in lines 31-35, but the descriptive phrase “happy and proud” is ambiguous, referring either to “I” or to “her eyes.” He feels that he has become her god or idol, although he is in the position himself of the worshiper, looking up as his elation further severs his swelling heart from his debating judgment. Lines 36-41 reveal the speaker’s intense need to capture the moment, to possess Porphyria permanently in a kind of aberration of an erotic consummation, the act of strangulation reported in the emphatic first half of line 41. The speaker’s certainty that she “felt no pain,” which he repeats, is further evidence of a bizarrely delusional personality. The simile of the bud mocks epic grandeur and, through grammatical ambiguity again, may refer to the speaker or the dead Porphyria, just as the laughing blue eyes may be his own or his hallucinative perception of hers. With Porphyria reduced to an unthreatening corpse and after having asserted his will by murdering her, the speaker is able to act part of the role of a lover as he kisses her dead cheek. It is clearly a demented lover, however, who takes possession of the corpse and interprets its expression as “glad” that its “will” is fulfilled since his love is “gained.” Use of the passive voice is significant throughout the poem, indicating a speaker who cannot feel responsible for what he does. Is the “one wish” (line 57) a “darling” wish because it is hers, or is it the wish of her “darling,” the disordered speaker? Does the speaker await, during and after the night vigil, blame or commendation from God?