Porphyria's Lover Essay

This is a typical higher poetry question for the exam. It uses five quotes, from different points in the poem.

Question -

Choose a poem in which the poet blends form and content. Show how the form contributes to your understanding of the poem.

‘Porphyria’s Lover’ by Robert Browning is a poem in which the poet has created a perfect blend of form and content. The poem is about a man with untold insecurities who takes the life of his lover due to paranoia, or perhaps plain insanity. The focus of this essay is to show how Browning effectively makes use of techniques such as personification, word choice and structure to convey a sense of the speaker’s strange state of mind.

At the start of the poem, the poet uses personification to create a furious, disturbing atmosphere:

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

He thus prepares the reader for what is to come in the poem. ‘Sullen’ and ‘spite’ suggest intense emotions, and it is as if the wind is a jilted lover destroying the countryside. Yet this violence is contrasted by the entrance of Porphyria when he says she ‘glided in’. It raises the reader’s expectations that this will be a passionate love poem. This makes her murder all the more shocking.

The poet uses understatement to create a sinister mood when the speaker kills his lover:

I found
A thing to do … And strangled her.

Strangling Porphyria is simply ‘A thing to do’ rather than a cold blooded murder. The fact the man ‘found’ this implies that he is not responsible. The strangling itself is revealed in dispassionate language: he winds her hair three times around her little throat. This either means that he fooled her by pretending this was a game; or, in reality, she struggled as he throttled her. The phrase ‘And strangled her.’ is the first sentence in the poem which ends in the middle of a line rather than at the end. This creates a sense of shock for the reader and shows how the killer does not grasp the enormity of what he has done.

The poet continues with an impassive tone when he reflects on her death, employing repetition for emphasis:

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

This immediately follows ‘And strangled her.’, so it is as if he is justifying his actions, and cannot bear to think of the reality. He repeats the word ‘pain’ and rephrases when he says with ‘I am quite sure …’, as though, in his heart, he has his doubts. If he is sure of something, it is also strange that he feels the need to try to persuade the reader as well.

The poet uses romantic imagery to describe Porpyria after her death:

again / Laugh’d the blue eyes without a stain

By showing his affection for her after her death, he shows how the murder is not real to him. He personifies her blue eyes as laughing, which would be a sweet image if it did not describe part of a dead body. He still sees her as a living person despite what he has done.

Finally, the poet uses an ironically upbeat tone in the last line of the poem:

And yet God has not said a word!

Even if you were a devout Christian, you would not expect God to speak. This ends the poem with a final self-justification from the killer. By using the present tense, the poet ends the poem in a dramatic way. The reader does not know what will happen next. The speaker might realise what he has done, or be arrested. By ending the poem at this point, we are left with the speaker’s intense feelings at this moment in time. Like him, we are not confronted with the consequences of her death. However, this implies that there may a punishment waiting for him in the afterlife.

Therefore, Browning’s ironic use of romantic, upbeat and understated tones show the strange state of mind of the speaker in ‘Porphyria’s Lover’. He uses repetition, structure and personification to reveals the strange, obsessive emotions which cause the murder. In this way, it has an excellent blend of form and content.