A* Notes on Porphyria's Lover

Structure, language, form... + analysis

  • Dramatic monologue -> univocal perspective from an unbiased narrator

  • No breaks in stanzas -> narrative becomes a stream of consciousness

  • Rural, isolated setting -> typical of romanticism, but alternate eerie dimension created by danger posed from such seclusion

  • Iambic tetrameter and ABABB regular rhyme scheme -> to mirror speaker's obsessive desire for control

  • Unusual extra line added on to conventional ABAB quatrain -> lack of rhythmical symmetry represents narrators instability

  • Pathetic fallacy in lines 1-5 -> harsh t consonances + violence of elements sets tone for poem

  • Caesura ending first 5 lines -> reflects narrator's obsession for control

  • Porphyria's ethereal, delicate depiction with line of enjambement upon her entrance -> highlights her transience and elegant motions + disrupts rigid caesura scheme thus far created + indicates she is challenging his sense of control

  • Multiple allusions to her hair -> foreboding

  • Active verbs used in association with Porphyria -> sense of her agency, control and sexual confidence

  • Soft l consonances used to frame murder -> juxtaposes against macabre subject matter

  • Enjambement and monosyllabic regular rhythm of words during murder -> mirrors and evokes motion of winding hair

  • Blazon to describe her dead body -> disgusting and deeply disquieting objectification + sinister warping of romantic trope

  • Porphyria stripped of title/ name and becomes the object 'it' -> disturbing irony because she has become an inanimate doll for the narrator

  • Final line has a trochaic beginning, 'And yet god has not said a word!' -> disruption of rigidly controlled iambic tetrameter, reflecting a burst in confidence and enthusiasm

  • Didactic tone –> Browning condemning acts of violence against women, whereby agent and sexually confident women unfairly inevitably punished/ killed/ repressed.

Themes

  • Power dynamics

  • Narrative perspectives

  • Gender dynamics

  • Control

  • Violence

  • Love

  • Crime

Context

  • Written in 1839, 19th Century in Victorian England, where women expected to serve household and husband

  • Set in Renaissance era (15th - 16th century)

  • Porphyria has dual semantics -> 1. disease that causes weakness, fever, madness and delusion. 2. colour purple.

  • Traditionally hair is symbolic of femininity and love

  • Pygmalion Myth = the male delusion that women can only be pure and truly feminine when they are an art object and under total control of men