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Porphyria's Lover Summary & Analysis
by Robert Browning

Porphyria's Lover Summary & Analysis
by Robert Browning

  • Intro
  • Summary
  • Themes
  • Line-by-Line
    Explanations
  • Symbols
  • Poetic
    Devices
  • Vocabulary &
    References
  • Form, Meter, &
    Rhyme Scheme
  • Speaker
  • Setting
  • Context
  • Resources
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The Full Text of “Porphyria's Lover”

1The rain set early in to-night,

2       The sullen wind was soon awake,

3It tore the elm-tops down for spite,

4       And did its worst to vex the lake:

5       I listened with heart fit to break.

6When glided in Porphyria; straight

7       She shut the cold out and the storm,

8And kneeled and made the cheerless grate

9       Blaze up, and all the cottage warm;

10       Which done, she rose, and from her form

11Withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl,

12       And laid her soiled gloves by, untied

13Her hat and let the damp hair fall,

14       And, last, she sat down by my side

15       And called me. When no voice replied,

16She put my arm about her waist,

17       And made her smooth white shoulder bare,

18And all her yellow hair displaced,

19       And, stooping, made my cheek lie there,

20       And spread, o'er all, her yellow hair,

21Murmuring how she loved me — she

22       Too weak, for all her heart's endeavour,

23To set its struggling passion free

24       From pride, and vainer ties dissever,

25       And give herself to me for ever.

26But passion sometimes would prevail,

27       Nor could to-night's gay feast restrain

28A sudden thought of one so pale

29       For love of her, and all in vain:

30       So, she was come through wind and rain.

31Be sure I looked up at her eyes

32       Happy and proud; at last I knew

33Porphyria worshipped me; surprise

34       Made my heart swell, and still it grew

35       While I debated what to do.

36That moment she was mine, mine, fair,

37       Perfectly pure and good: I found

38A thing to do, and all her hair

39       In one long yellow string I wound

40       Three times her little throat around,

41And strangled her. No pain felt she;

42       I am quite sure she felt no pain.

43As a shut bud that holds a bee,

44       I warily oped her lids: again

45       Laughed the blue eyes without a stain.

46And I untightened next the tress

47       About her neck; her cheek once more

48Blushed bright beneath my burning kiss:

49       I propped her head up as before,

50       Only, this time my shoulder bore

51Her head, which droops upon it still:

52       The smiling rosy little head,

53So glad it has its utmost will,

54       That all it scorned at once is fled,

55       And I, its love, am gained instead!

56Porphyria's love: she guessed not how

57       Her darling one wish would be heard.

58And thus we sit together now,

59       And all night long we have not stirred,

60       And yet God has not said a word!

  • “Porphyria's Lover” Introduction

    • "Porphyria’s Lover" is a poem by the British poet Robert Browning, first published in 1836. Along with"My Last Duchess," it has become one of Browning’s most famous dramatic monologues—due in no small part to its shockingly dark ending. In the poem, the speaker describes being visited by his passionate lover, Porphyria. After realizing how much she cares for him, however, the speaker strangles Porphyria and then props her lifeless body up beside him. He then concludes the poem by announcing that God has yet to punish him for this murder. While the speaker is often taken to be a madman, his (very twisted) motivations seem clear: in killing Porphyria, he takes control over her, transforming her into an obedient object that will remain "pure" forever.

  • “Porphyria's Lover” Summary

    • It started raining early tonight. The wind began to howl, breaking the tops of the elm-trees just for fun and disturbing the waters of the lake. I was listening to the storm, thinking my heart was about to break, when Porphyria came in. Right away, she shut the windows to keep out the cold and the wind. She knelt down and lit a blazing fire in the fireplace, making my cottage warm. When she was done with that, she took off her wet cloak and shawl, put down her dirty gloves, untied her hat to let her damp hair fall loose, and, finally, came and sat down next to me and spoke to me. I didn’t say anything back, so she put my arm around her waist. Then she brushed her blonde hair off her smooth, white shoulder and laid my cheek on it. Then she spread her hair over my face and her shoulder, whispering that she loved me. Despite how much she wanted to be with me, pride (and other, even sillier, feelings) stood in the way, stopping her from indulging in her desires and letting me possess her forever. But her desire would sometimes get the best of her. And even though she had been at a happy, raucous party earlier in the evening, she couldn’t help thinking about me—picturing me wanting to be with her so badly that it made me weak and pale, and all for nothing. So she came in the storm to see me. Don’t doubt it: I looked up at her happy, proud eyes, and in that moment I was finally sure of it: Porphyria loved me completely. Suddenly realizing how much she loved me filled my heart with happiness and pride, and it just kept getting fuller as I tried to figure out what to do next. In that moment she belonged to me, and only me, and she was beautiful, virtuous, and noble. I finally figured out what to do: I gathered her hair into one blonde rope and twisted it around her thin neck three times in order to strangle her. She didn’t feel any pain. I’m totally sure she didn’t feel any pain. Her eyes were like a flower with its petals closed up around a bee. I cautiously opened up her lids and saw her blue eyes again, looking happy and perfect. I loosened the hair from around her neck. Her cheek was rosy beneath my passionate kiss again. I propped up her head—this time it rested on my shoulder. Her little smiling pink face is still there, resting on my shoulder. She’s so happy she finally got what she wanted, that all the things she struggled with are gone and that she has won my love instead. She never guessed how I would interpret her single, sweet desire. So we're sitting together and we haven’t moved all night. And God hasn’t said anything about it!

  • “Porphyria's Lover” Themes

    • Theme Love, Violence, and Control

      Love, Violence, and Control

      The violent climax of “Porphyria’s Lover” comes as a shock: right in the middle of a tender moment, the speaker suddenly decides to strangle Porphyria, the woman he loves. Many scholars have argued that the speaker is mad—in fact, in 1842 the poem was published alongside another of Browning’s poems and collectively titled “Madhouse Cells”—but his violence might not be all that random. Instead, it seems he kills Porphyria for a certain set of perverse reasons: he wants to fulfill (what he thinks is) Porphyria’s “one wish” to fully surrender herself to him, and to make this loving moment last forever. Told entirely from the vantage point of its twisted speaker, the poem positions love as a form of total submission, and violence as a means of control.

      When Porphyria first appears, she is presented as a strong-willed woman—especially for the stodgy Victorian time period in which the poem was written. As soon as she enters the cottage, she shuts out the storm and starts a fire, reshaping the environment in which the speaker exists. And while the speaker is “so pale,” she casts off her rain-soaked clothes as though the bad weather doesn’t trouble her at all. She even supports the speaker on her shoulder, physically propping him up.

      Moreover, her decision to come to the cottage in the first place reflects an independent streak. Though she’s been at a “gay feast,” she decides to go out in a storm to be with the person she loves. For the speaker this marks a kind of internal triumph: though she’s been struggling to balance what her “heart” desires” with her “pride,” she has chosen to give into passion, to throw caution to the wind. In other words, she has chosen her own desires over the social punishment that might arise from indulging in them. Especially for a woman in 19th century England—a period in which women’s sexuality and ability to engage in public life was tightly controlled—Porphyria is presented as a willful woman with genuine agency.

      Once Porphyria gives into her passion, however, her status changes. She stops being an independent person. The speaker describes her as “mine, mine, fair, / Perfectly pure and good.” The repetition of the word “mine” emphasizes that Porphyria has become a possession, an object—something the speaker owns. And by strangling her, the speaker can keep her in that “pure and good” state.

      After Porphyria is dead, she ceases to have the control and agency she displayed earlier in the poem. Instead of opening her eyes, the speaker opens them for her. Instead of supporting the speaker’s head on her shoulder, he supports her on his shoulder. As a result, she cannot remove herself from his embrace: she is permanently under his control, permanently “mine, mine.” By killing Porphyria, the speaker establishes control over her, takes away her agency, and turns her from an active subject into a passive object. And in his twisted mind, he’s done the right thing—granted his lover’s “one wish” to be with him forever.

    • Theme Sexuality, Morality, and Hypocrisy

      Sexuality, Morality, and Hypocrisy

      As “Porphyria’s Lover” ends, Porphyria (now dead) and the speaker sit all night in their strange embrace. The speaker’s power over Porphyria has become absolute and unbending. Yet despite the speaker’s violent and disturbing crime, he appears to go unpunished: as he announces triumphantly in the poem’s final line, “And yet God has not said a word!”

      For the speaker, it seems this silence means that God approves of his decision to murder Porphyria, since doing so forever keeps her “perfectly pure and good.” And given the strong sexual undertones of the poem, with its mention of bare shoulders and burning kisses, the speaker is probably thinking specifically of sexual purity here. Essentially, the speaker thinks that by murdering Porphyria he prevents her from sinning; by killing Porphyria, the speaker prevents her from straying into sexual acts that might endanger her soul’s status with God.

      This is clearly a twisted interpretation of morality, but it could be the poem's way of critiquing those who would prioritize restrictive ideas about virtue above actual human life. The speaker assumes that God values purity above all else—so much so that he’s willing to allow murder. God's silence suggests to the speaker that he has not only gotten away with murder, but that he was justified in killing in the first place.

      Taken in context, the poem might be suggesting the hypocrisy of the early-Victorian society in which Browning lived—a very religious world that seemed to outwardly condemn any inkling of moral deviance, and in which female sexuality was particularly restricted and controlled. Perhaps the poem is saying that an obsession with being "good" has come at the expense of actually being good—that is, of appreciating and valuing other people.

      On the one hand, the early readers of the poem would likely have condemned Porphyria for embracing her own sexuality. On the other hand, they would have been titillated by the poem’s violence and sensationalism. Browning manages to give them what they want: a very sexual, very titillating poem—that also punishes sexual freedom. The speaker’s violence thus not only preserves Porphyria’s sexual purity, it also preserves the reader’s: since the poem punishes her for her sexuality, it gives the reader a kind of plausible deniability. In this way, the Victorian reader is just as hypocritical as the speaker, defending violence because it preserves a narrow notion of sexual purity.

  • Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Porphyria's Lover”

    • Lines 1-5

      The rain set early in to-night,
             The sullen wind was soon awake,
      It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
             And did its worst to vex the lake:
             I listened with heart fit to break.

      The first five lines of “Porphyria’s Lover” establish the poem’s mood and setting. The speaker is in an isolated, rural place. It’s rainy and windy, violently so. The wind is churning up big waves on the lake and breaking the tops of the elm trees—and it seems to be doing so on purpose, personified as acting out of “spite,” or bitter anger. Note the consonance of the /t/ sounds in line 3: “It tore the elm-tops down for spite.” The /t/ sound is harsh and percussive, and it echoes the violence of the wind: one can almost hear the trees cracking. The speaker doesn't seem to be in a good mental place, as he describes himself listening to the wind “with heart fit to break.” This all sets the tone for the poem, which will be as violent and disturbing as the storm outside.

      The poem's form is also established right up top. It is written in iambic tetrameter, meaning there are four iambs (unstressed-stressed) in each line:

      The rain set early in to-night,

      The poem’s meter starts off strong and regular, and it stays that way. There are relatively few metrical substitutions in the poem—so when they do appear, they are striking and surprising. There’s something a little strange about the poem’s metrical perfection, and it will become clear soon enough that it reflects the speaker's obsession with control.

      The poem follows a rather unusual rhyme scheme, ABABB (it is actually sometimes printed in a series of five-line stanzas to better display this rhyme scheme). Its first few lines look like a common ABAB quatrain, but then there's this extra line tacked on. Once again, it feels like there’s something a little off here, something obsessive, in the poem’s form: the speaker can’t quite let go and move onto the next rhyme. This obsessive, controlling energy is also evident, at least initially, in the poem’s use of end-stop: each of the poem’s first five lines are end-stopped. (When Porphyria enters in line 6 she disrupts this contained, controlled poetic world.)

    • Lines 6-9

      When glided in Porphyria; straight
             She shut the cold out and the storm,
      And kneeled and made the cheerless grate
             Blaze up, and all the cottage warm;

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    • Lines 10-15

      Which done, she rose, and from her form
      Withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl,
             And laid her soiled gloves by, untied
      Her hat and let the damp hair fall,
             And, last, she sat down by my side
             And called me.

    • Lines 15-18

      When no voice replied,
      She put my arm about her waist,
             And made her smooth white shoulder bare,
      And all her yellow hair displaced,

    • Lines 19-21

      And, stooping, made my cheek lie there,
             And spread, o'er all, her yellow hair,
      Murmuring how she loved me

    • Lines 21-25

      she
             Too weak, for all her heart's endeavour,
      To set its struggling passion free
             From pride, and vainer ties dissever,
             And give herself to me for ever.

    • Lines 26-30

      But passion sometimes would prevail,
             Nor could to-night's gay feast restrain
      A sudden thought of one so pale
             For love of her, and all in vain:
             So, she was come through wind and rain.

    • Lines 31-35

      Be sure I looked up at her eyes
             Happy and proud; at last I knew
      Porphyria worshipped me; surprise
             Made my heart swell, and still it grew
             While I debated what to do.

    • Lines 36-41

      That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
             Perfectly pure and good: I found
      A thing to do, and all her hair
             In one long yellow string I wound
             Three times her little throat around,
      And strangled her.

    • Lines 41-45

      No pain felt she;
             I am quite sure she felt no pain.
      As a shut bud that holds a bee,
             I warily oped her lids: again
             Laughed the blue eyes without a stain.

    • Lines 46-51

      And I untightened next the tress
             About her neck; her cheek once more
      Blushed bright beneath my burning kiss:
             I propped her head up as before,
             Only, this time my shoulder bore
      Her head, which droops upon it still:

    • Lines 52-56

      The smiling rosy little head,
      So glad it has its utmost will,
             That all it scorned at once is fled,
             And I, its love, am gained instead!
      Porphyria's love:

    • Lines 56-60

      she guessed not how
             Her darling one wish would be heard.
      And thus we sit together now,
             And all night long we have not stirred,
             And yet God has not said a word!

  • “Porphyria's Lover” Symbols

    • Symbol The Cheerless Grate

      The Cheerless Grate

      As soon as Porphyria arrives at the speaker’s cottage, she starts sprucing the place up, closing the windows and lighting a fire in the fireplace, which the speaker calls “the cheerless grate.” This is partially a literal action: Porphyria really does light a fire and make the cottage warm. But it’s also symbolic: the fireplace or the hearth represents warmth, cheer, and comfort. It’s the heart of the home, the place where people gather on cold nights like the one the speaker describes to be together. And in the context of Victorian gender roles, it’s a part of the house associated with women—with their responsibilities to take care of the home and make it a warm, welcoming place for their husbands and sons. In a sense, then, Porphyria goes right where she’s supposed to go, or at least right where Victorian readers would expect her to go—to the symbolic heart of the home.

    • Symbol Soiled Gloves

      Soiled Gloves

      After Porphyria closes the windows and lights the fire, she starts taking off her wet clothes, her “dripping cloak and shawl.” Among the items she takes off are a pair of “soiled gloves.” These are primarily literal—as literal as her cloak or her shawl. But the word “soiled’ suggests that they also carry some symbolic weight. The word literally means that they’re dirty and wet. But it also has a moral sense: it can mean that something (or someone) is morally compromised. And it’s especially associated with sexuality.

      By using the word, the speaker suggests that Porphyria already has committed some kind of sexual transgression. The gloves then symbolize her moral state—or, at least, the speaker’s interpretation of that moral state. They suggest that, even before Porphyria gives herself fully to the speaker, he already regards her as sexually compromised—and they call into question his confident assertion later in the poem that she is “perfectly pure.” He seems to have some doubt, some jealousy, that he hasn’t fully acknowledged.

    • Symbol Yellow Hair

      Yellow Hair

      The speaker of “Porphyria’s Lover” seems obsessed with Porphyria's hair: he brings it up repeatedly, precisely describing what she does with it. And then, of course, he uses that hair to strangle her. While Porphyria does literally have blond hair, her hair also serves as a symbol of female beauty, power, and danger for the speaker.

      This is a traditional symbol with a long history in English poetry. In love poetry, women’s hair is often treated as something both seductive and dangerous. In Spenser’s Amoretti XXXVII, for example, the speaker describes his mistress’s hair as a “net of gold”: it seduces him but it also traps him. “Porphyria’s Lover” plays on this tradition. The speaker clearly finds Porphyria’s hair very attractive and seductive—he can’t shut up about it. But he refuses to be trapped or constrained by her hair, as Spenser’s speaker was. Instead, he turns it against Porphyria, making it into a weapon. If Porphyria’s hair is a traditional symbol of the seductive power of women’s bodies, then the speaker is eager to rob that symbol of its power—or, more precisely, to take that power for himself.

    • Symbol Gay Feast

      Gay Feast

      Porphyria makes a big sacrifice to come visit the speaker: she leaves a “gay feast”—a raucous, happy party. And she trades that happy party for a gloomy, cold cottage, with a lover so weak that he can’t even answer her questions. This seems to be literally true: Porphyria was at a feast on the night the poem takes place. But it also has some symbolic resonance. The "gay feast" symbolizes the richness and pleasure of Porphyria’s life. She has a busy social calendar; she lives in a happy, bright world full of parties and people. And she gives that up, simply because she loves the poem’s speaker. That makes her fate all the more tragic: she could’ve been happy if she had just stayed in the happy, safe life she already enjoyed.

    • Symbol Pale

      Pale

      In lines 28-29, the speaker describes himself as “one so pale / for love.” In other words, he’s so in love with Porphyria that the color has drained from his skin. Because he loves her—and because that love is unsatisfied—he looks ill, weak, under-nourished. This may be literally true: the speaker does seem physically weak at the start of the poem. But paleness is also a traditional symbol in love poetry: it represents intense erotic desire.

      Indeed, love poems often represent desire itself as a sickness or illness, an illness that drains the lover of their natural energy and vitality. In describing himself as “one so pale,” then, the speaker doesn’t simply offer a description of his own physical condition. He also positions himself as someone who fulfills the traditional role of the lover. He looks like someone passionately in love. The symbol makes him seem like a recognizable, normal figure in a love poem. And in this way it tricks the reader into feeling calm and assured—unsuspecting of the violence about to break loose.

    • Symbol Blush

      Blush

      After the speaker strangles Porphyria, he slowly loosens the knots around her neck. As he does so, her “cheek once more / Blushed bright.” He’s describing a literal phenomenon here with some scientific backing: after strangulation, blood returns to the face, making it look the victim is blushing. However, the speaker isn’t really worried about what’s literally happening to Porphyria. He’s much more concerned with what her “bright” cheeks symbolize.

      This is, of course, a matter of interpretation. The speaker interprets it as a sign that Porphyria’s beauty and vitality have not been compromised by his violent act, that she remains essentially unchanged, even after being strangled. And in this way, it releases him from any guilt or responsibility he might otherwise feel for what he’s done. Since she remains as beautiful and lively as ever, he thinks that he hasn’t really harmed her.

      Interpreted differently, the fact that her cheeks now blush in death could suggest a sense of demureness; now that the speaker is sure he has preserved Porphyria's purity for good, he imagines her bashfully blushing in response to her kiss (a far cry from the bold woman presented earlier in the poem).

  • “Porphyria's Lover” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

    • End-Stopped Line

      “Porphyria’s Lover” is a poem about control—and the lengths to which the speaker is willing to go to achieve it. The poem’s enjambments and end-stops often reflect that desire for control. For example, line 41-42 are both end-stopped:

      No pain felt she;
      I am quite sure she felt no pain.

      In these lines, the end-stops are definite and strong. They suggest that the speaker is unwilling to even imagine an alternative, to allow any doubt about his account of things. In this sense, the underline how he has taken control over Porphyria and excluded her personal experience from the poem.

      Yet the poem's use of end-stops also registers the way that Porphyria’s presence upsets his control. The poem begins with five end-stops in a row. Only when Porphyria enters the poem in line 6 does the poem use enjambment for the first time. It then switches back and forth between enjambment and end-stop, almost as though the speaker and Porphyria are battling for control over the poem, the speaker trying to constrain the poem’s sentences and Porphyria, with her dynamism and energy pushing them past the boundaries of the line breaks.

      One can see this struggle if one takes a closer look at the relationship between the poem’s rhyme scheme and its enjambments and end-stops. Poets often try to close a group of rhymes with an end-stop: doing so helps give the poem an internal structure. And “Porphyria’s Lover” starts out that way: when the speaker reaches the end of the first group of ABABB rhymes, in line 5, he also uses an end-stop: "I listened with heart fit to break." Porphyria’s entrance into the poem upsets that pattern: the next group of rhymes ends in line 10, but line 10 is enjambed—"...and from her form / Withdrew..."

      Only in line 25, when the speaker fantasizes that Porphyria might “give herself to me forever,” does the speaker manage to end a group of rhymes with an end-stop. It is as though Porphyria’s independence, her energy and dynamism, upsets the control that the speaker wishes to assert over his own poem. But once the speaker gets Porphyria where he wants her, he reestablishes this control. After line 25, there's only one moment where the end of a group of rhymes doesn’t coincide with an end-stop: in line 50, where he lays her head on his shoulder. (Line 40 is technically end-stopped, but it may feel more like an enjambment because of the way the sentence continues in the next line—the speaker seems to almost lose control in that moment). In this moment, the speaker’s own passion and excitement seem to overcome his desire for control—ironically, right at the moment he achieves that control.

    • Enjambment

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    • Caesura

    • Simile

    • Metaphor

    • Repetition

    • Chiasmus

    • Alliteration

    • Assonance

    • Consonance

  • “Porphyria's Lover” Vocabulary

    Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

    • Sullen
    • Spite
    • Vex
    • Porphyria
    • Straight
    • Grate
    • Soiled
    • Displaced
    • O'er
    • Endeavor
    • Passion
    • Vainer
    • Ties
    • Dissever
    • Prevail
    • Gay
    • Restrain
    • String
    • Oped
    • Untightened
    • Tress
    • Burning
    • Droops
    • Utmost
    • Will
    • Gained
    Sullen

    • Angry, malicious, or moody.

  • Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Porphyria's Lover”

    • Form

      Porphyria’s Lover” is a dramatic monologue, a form for which Robert Browning was well known. According to the literary critic M.H. Abrams, dramatic monologues have three key characteristics. First, they are written in the voice of a character who is definitely not the author: there’s a strong separation between speaker and author. In “Porphyria’s Lover,” the speaker is a strange, violent man who murders his lover—one hopes there’s a big difference between him and the poet!

      Second, that character interacts with other people—but readers only learn about those people through the character’s description of them and their actions. In other words, the speaker of a dramatic monologue is an unreliable narrator. The reader sees the world through his or her eyes—and has to judge how accurate or fair that perspective really is. Thus, in the key moments of “Porphyria’s Lover,” the reader has to judge the speaker based on his description of what happens. One might doubt, for instance, whether to believe the speaker’s claim that “No pain felt she; / I am quite sure she felt no pain.” However, the reader can’t appeal to Porphyria to confirm or deny the speaker’s assertion: she doesn’t get to speak in the poem.

      Third, the point of the poem is to reveal the dynamics of the speaker’s character: his or her motivations, the things that make him or her tick. Thus “Porphyria’s Lover” meditates on the speaker’s desire for control over Porphyria, his interest in making her into an object. It exposes his psychology—and the psychology of his culture, with its tight restrictions on female sexuality.

      In this sense, “Porphyria’s Lover” is a textbook example of a dramatic monologue—fittingly enough, since Browning helped make the form popular. He’s still one of its most famous practitioners. A dramatic monologue does not have a set meter or rhyme scheme: it’s up to the poet to find a form that suits the character they’ve created—in the case of "Porphyria's Lover" a single long stanza, with a meter and rhyme scheme Browning concocted for the occasion. Occasionally the poem is printed with its five-line sections separated out into distinct stanzas in accordance with the poem's ABABB rhyme scheme.

    • Meter

      “Porphyria’s Lover” is written in iambic tetrameter. This means there are four poetic feet in each line, each with an unstressed-stressed syllable pattern. One can hear this rhythm in the poem’s opening line:

      The rain | set ear- | ly in | to-night,

      Iambic tetrameter is a little looser, a little lighter, than its close relative, iambic pentameter (which has the same rhythm but with one more foot per line, for a total of 10 syllables). It signals that the poem is not intended to be grand and ambitious; it feels, at least initially, a bit playful. This is a red herring: Browning lulls his reader, making them feel like the poem won’t be ambitious or serious. When the poem explodes into violence, it’s thus all the more shocking.

      The meter of “Porphyria’s Lover” is extremely strict: the poem contains relatively few metrical substitutions, especially for a poem of its length. Poets usually use metrical substitutions to make their poems feel natural and fresh; without such variations, a poem written in meter quickly becomes monotonous. Without these breaks and syncopations in the rhythm, “Porphyria’s Lover” feels a bit unnatural, obsessive: the poem’s regularity reflects the speaker’s own damaged and obsessive state of mind.

      When metrical variations do show up, they’re much louder and more disruptive than they’d be in a poem with more substitutions. For instance, there is a trochee (stressed-unstressed) in the second foot of the poem’s final line:

      And yet | God has | not said | a word!

      The line is straightforward and metrically regular, except for the word “God” which breaks up the rhythm. The word seems to throw the speaker’s confidence, to knock him out of the obsessive orbit of his thoughts. Perhaps he is not quite as confident as he pretends to be about whether God approves of his crime. The metrical substitution suggests that he might have some niggling doubts.

      Similarly, line 48 opens with a spondee (stressed-stressed) in its first foot:

      Blushed bright | beneath | my burn- | ing kiss:

      The spondee suggests the force of the speaker’s sexual desire, which overpowers his otherwise tight control of the poem’s meter. If the regularity of the meter in the poem suggests obsession and control, the metrical variations—when they do appear—suggest moments of passion and doubt that overwhelm the speaker and invade his otherwise tightly limited world.

    • Rhyme Scheme

      “Porphyria’s Lover” has an unusual rhyme scheme. The poem can be divided into groups of 5 lines, each rhymed

      ABABB

      In some printings of the poem, each of these five-line groups is its own stanza. Each group of five lines introduces a new set of rhymes: the poem doesn't repeat its rhymes between stanzas in any patterned way. So the rhyme scheme extends in five-line segments through the whole poem:

      ABABBCDCDDEFEFF

      ...and so on.

      English poetry generally avoids organizing rhymes into five-line groups. It’s hard to find a logical organization for a five-line rhyme scheme—as “Porphyria’s Lover” itself makes clear. The poem’s rhyme scheme is a little awkward, a little strange. It looks like a standard ABAB rhyme scheme—but with an extra line tacked on. As a result the poem feels obsessive, as though the speaker can’t quite let go of something. Alongside the poem’s highly—uncomfortably—regular meter, the poem feels just a bit off. Its unusual rhyme scheme registers the strained, obsessive character of the speaker’s thinking.

      It's worth noting the relationship between the poem's rhyme scheme and its use of enjambment and end-stop. Often poets coordinate rhyme scheme and enjambment: for example, a set of four lines rhyming ABAB will close with an end-stop. This helps divide a poem into clear units. Working together, end-stop and rhyme guide the reader. This can serve as a sign that the speaker is in control, confident.

      The first five lines of "Porphyria's Lover" exhibit this confidence and control: the speaker uses them to describe the poem’s settings and his feelings. There’s an end-stop at the end of line 5; in line 6, he switches topics and describes Porphyria’s arrival. Once she enters the poem, things get a bit more complicated. Line 10 is not end-stopped: the five-line group of rhymes ends, but the sentence doesn’t. It keeps going into a new group of rhymes. This happens again in line 15 and in line 20. Porphyria’s dynamism and energy have upset the poem, overwhelming the boundaries of the units of rhyme.

      Only in line 25 does the poem right itself: the line is end-stopped and it also ends a group of rhymes. The speaker has regained his control and assurance. This happens at a key moment: when he contemplates Porphyria giving “herself to me for ever.” At just the moment when the speaker considers controlling Porphyria, he also takes control over his poem. The speaker only loses that control twice in the rest of the poem: in line 50, when he's putting her head on his shoulder. In this moment his passion and violence overcome his control—perhaps subtly suggesting that he has lost control of himself.

  • “Porphyria's Lover” Speaker

    • From the very start of the poem, the speaker is a mysterious, scary, and downright weird figure. The poem opens on a dark and stormy night: despite the rain and wind, the speaker has no fire to keep the place warm. When his love, Porphyria, arrives, he is weak and “pale,” as though the life has been sucked out of him: Porphyria has to support his head on her shoulder. (Though the speaker never explicitly reveals his gender, it’s safe to assume that he’s a man, given the period in which the poem was written). However, once the speaker realizes that Porphyria loves him, he becomes violent and powerful. He transforms from a weak, wan figure to someone capable of strangling his lover. He ends the poem in control of Porphyria’s body, which he has reduced to an object. And, in contrast to his earlier indecision, he is so confident in his own violent choices that he assumes God Himself approves of his decisions.

      Because the speaker is so unpredictable, so weird and so violent, many people characterize the speaker as a madman. The poet who wrote “Porphyria’s Lover,” Robert Browning, was fascinated with abnormal psychology; Porphyria takes her name from a disease that causes weakness, delusions, and eventually death—a disease that had been recently diagnosed in the years before the poem was written. It seems likely that the speaker is crazy—but if he is, then his madness is not the main focus of the poem. Instead, the focus is on the acts that his madness makes him commit—and the reasons he develops justifying them.

      Some of the speaker’s strangeness comes from the poem’s literary form. “Porphyria’s Lover” is a dramatic monologue. In a dramatic monologue, the poet writes in the voice of a character, who speaks directly to the reader about his or her life—as though on stage. This gives the poet the freedom to imagine and occupy other people’s minds. In poems like “Porphyria’s Lover” and “My Last Duchess,” Browning used this freedom to imagine the minds of violent, disturbed people. Because the character in a dramatic monologue is so separate from the author, the author has the space to discuss things that might otherwise be shocking or taboo.

  • “Porphyria's Lover” Setting

    • “Porphyria’s Lover” is set in a cottage on a stormy night. In the opening lines of the poem, the speaker gives the reader some important details about the setting: it’s raining and windy. The speaker is in a cold cottage and he hasn’t built a fire. From the cottage, he can see elm trees and a lake. The wind is violent enough that breaks the tops of the elm trees and tosses the lake with big waves.

      Porphyria’s entrance, in line 6, transforms the setting of the poem: she shuts the door and lights a fire, turning a dreary and cold cottage into a warm, welcoming place. The poem thus draws a contrast between the violence of the natural world and the warmth and coziness of the cottage, warmth and coziness which is associated in the poem with femininity.

      The setting of the poem is thus almost a cliché: the poem might as well start, “It was a dark and stormy night.” And associating the wholesome warmth of a house with a woman is also a cliché: in the Victorian period women were expected to be “angels in the house,” working to make their homes warm and welcoming for their husbands and sons. This is an intentional set-up, a kind of red herring. Browning wants the reader to feel like the poem is familiar and predictable, well within the borders of both literary tradition and Victorian morality, so that the reader feels lulled, complacent. The violence that erupts later in the poem will thus be all the more shocking and unexpected. It breaks, radically, with the reader’s expectations.

  • Literary and Historical Context of “Porphyria's Lover”

      Literary Context

      “Porphyria’s Lover” is a dramatic monologue—one of the classic examples of the form. Browning didn’t invent the dramatic monologue, but he did a lot to sharpen and crystallize it. As the literary scholar M.H. Abrams argues, a dramatic monologue focuses on a single character: the poem unfolds in that character’s voice. And the form is marked by its interest in that character’s motivations, his or her state of mind. For that reason, dramatic monologues tend to pay close attention to psychologies of the characters they present, offering up telling details that help the reader understand a character’s motivations, ideas, and background.

      Dramatic monologues developed out of British Romanticism. At the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century, poets like William Wordsworth and Percy Shelley started writing autobiographical poems that focused, in detail, on their inner lives. (Indeed, Wordsworth’s book long epic, The Prelude, concentrates entirely on the development of his own mental habits as a poet.) They were the first English language poets to focus on the depths of the psyche—and they inspired poets like Browning and Matthew Arnold to go further, to imagine how they could bring the same psychological depth to poems about other people’s lives.

      In the Victorian period (the historical and literary period that followed Romanticism), the dramatic monologue thus became a popular and widely written form. Some of the most famous examples from the period include Browning’s own poem, “My Last Duchess,” as well as Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses.” And although Browning wrote in other forms, he is best remembered as a writer of dramatic monologues.

      Historical Context

      At first glance, “Porphyria’s Lover” feels disconnected from history. It does not refer to historical events or even objects that belong to a specific historical period or place. It feels like the poem could take place anytime, anywhere. This is part of what makes it so terrifying. The speaker is unusual, even crazy. But it’s easy to imagine him emerging from any number of human societies—including our own.

      However, the poem does reflect the gender norms of the period in which it was written, early in the Victorian era. (The poem was actually published in 1836, just before Victoria took the throne—but it is usually grouped, for convenience’s sake, with other Victorian poems.) During the Victorian period, social norms around gender and sexuality began to harden. Particularly in middle- and upper-class households, women were expected to be “angels in the house,” as one popular Victorian saying has it—dedicated to the comfort of their husbands and sons, constrained to domestic duties, while men worked in public life and in business. For a Victorian reader, the opening description of Porphyria—out alone, on a stormy night—would’ve been shocking, even scandalous. She is marked as someone who refuses the social constraints on women’s lives and activities. And she's out in the storm to satisfy her heart's "struggling passion"—all the more shocking in a society that tightly controlled women's sexuality.

      However, she quickly expresses her agency and willfulness by making the speaker’s cottage more warm and welcoming—activities more in line with an “angel in the house.” In the way that Porphyria both performs—and refuses—the limits placed on women in Victorian society, the poem subtly acknowledges its own historical context.

  • More “Porphyria's Lover” Resources

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