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"Porphyria's Lover" by Robert Browning is an amazing poem that conveys the idea of love, a concept that many poems have been the sole focus of, in an unconventional and unexpected way. Rather than explain and profess the speaker's love for Porphyria, making the poem about her, Browning manipulates the narration to make the poem about the speaker, and reiterates his point of doing so in his title. As a reader, I've never really seen acts of love parallel to violence so indiscreetly that it almost doesn't seem violent at all once you finish reading the poem. When I think the words "love poem", I imagine one professing their love with cliche phrases and a sense of naivete throughout their work, giving me no sense of excitement, and no imagery or symbolism that I couldn't get from any other love poem.
Browning makes a violent murder scene seem natural and peaceful. His metaphor that compares Porphyria's shut eye to a shut flower bud that holds a bee references the beauty and power of nature, but still depicts natural violent occurrences, not veering off completely with his craft of writing, and keeping in mind the mood after the first shift in the poem and keeping to that mood, not distracting the reader too much from what is actually going on in the poem with literary features. Browning does a very good job with controlling the reader's response to his advantage.
Browning, rather than using the idea of, for example, the institution of marriage, or exclusivity between two lovers, uses murder as a means for the speaker to preserve and in a sense progress their love. Not so much do I appreciate the way the speaker maintains, in his mind, the current state of mind of him and his lover (through murder), but rather the shocking ending to the poem that is unexpected and entertaining. This poem showed me that no matter how cliche a subject or topic of poetry may be, these same ideas can be easily manipulated to a poet's liking.
This poem reminds me of the painting by Ophelia by John Everett Millais (PRB). The way that the girl in the poem is pliable and submissive very much brings that picture to mind. I agree - the way he tells the story feels like conversation in a coffee shop over a latte, which is really creepy when you consider the content. It’s strange that he chose to run everything together into one long stanza. Even though he adheres to a strict rhyme, I think the elimination of stanzas somehow made the scheme less pronounced when I read it. About midway through, Browning talks of Porphyria’s love as something attained with some difficulty:
ReplyDeleteToo weak, for all her heart's endeavour, To set its struggling passion free
I think perhaps to offer a motive for the subject? This one statement definitely kept me interested. That entire middle section discusses the poet’s interpretation of the internal conflict she suffers. I’m a little unclear about the last line ‘God has not said a word!’. It’s one of those exclamations that reminds me of Kooser’s remarks about trying to sum up the poem with something profound (but really profoundly out of place). That line seemed misplaced to me.
I'm so glad someone chose a poem by Robert Browning to write about! The ideas of violence and love, violent love and even a love of violence weave so well in his works. There is a sense of beauty and the wrongness of that beauty which lingers. Have you read his "My Last Duchess"? The narrator of that poem seems to follow the same psychopathy as this narrator, could even be this same narrator. Definitely worth checking out if you get the chance.
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