Robert Browning- Porphyria’s Lover analysis (GCE): A Masquerade of Spontaneous murder?

The rain set early in tonight,
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.
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;
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. When no voice replied,
She put my arm about her waist,
And made her smooth white shoulder bare,
And all her yellow hair displaced,
And, stooping, made my cheek lie there,
And spread, o’er all, her yellow hair,
Murmuring how she loved me—she
Too weak, for all her heart’s endeavor,
To set its struggling passion free
From pride, and vainer ties dissever,
And give herself to me forever.
But passion sometimes would prevail,
Nor could tonight’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.
Be sure I looked up at her eyes
Happy and proud; at last I knew
Porphyria worshiped me: surprise
Made my heart swell, and still it grew
While I debated what to do.
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. 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.
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:
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: 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 is a chilling dramatic monologue, sharing with both Browning’s My Last Duchess and The Laboratory, a choice of narrator whose sanity is questionable and whose murderous urges gain uneasy momentum as the poem progresses.

The apparently low key confidentiality of the narrator’s voice progressively reveals his disturbing obsession with the unfortunate Porphyria, an obsession particularly concerned with her  long golden hair.  This hair obsession has a passing resemblance to Carol Ann Duffy’s sonnet ‘Hour’ where her beloved too possesses hair that fascinates, though Duffy uses the hair in a different, though still fatalistic way, as a sign of her lover’s materialistic urges. (Her Midas touch)!

Hair in Porphyria’s Lover seems fetishistically worshipped and then fatally and fatefully hijacked for the Lover’s murderous ends. He bathes in it only to then appropriate it away from Porphyria and uses it to consign her to a violent and unnecessarily early death.

The apparent spontaneity of the narrator’s decision is something I will debate in this short analysis, as I believe that the murder is in fact premeditated and that the lover has his own reasons for his affectation of spontaneity.

It is a masquerade of spontaneity-  masking cold blooded murder for utterly self obsessed reasons.

Porphyria’s Lover as the poem’s (later) title suggests emphasises the anonymous lover’s relationship with the apparently beautiful Porphyria.  I say apparently as in this  poem, as with other dramatic monolgues, the narrator’s words are the only words were actually hear.

Porphyria is imprisoned by her lover linguistically as well as physically and psychologically within the boundaries of the text. 

Porphyria herself  like the Duchess in My Last Duchess remains but a voiceless  object, a female figure acted upon with no agency within the poem. The female  is a sexual commodity to be destroyed on a jealous whim by monomaniacal males who cannot bear the ‘uncertainty’ of love.

The poem opens with a description by the lover/speaker of the ‘sullen’ wind and accompanying weather full of ‘spite’. . The word choice reveals the mental state of the speaker as his use of the pathetic fallacy gives emphasis to his mood and anticipates his attitude towards Pophyria whom he awaits none too cheerfully nor innocently!

It is important that we readers pay attention to the setting as it confirms the unhappy mental state of the lover whom I believe is already incubating thoughts of murder.

The ‘heart fit to break’ suggests that the speaker is distressed and borrows a language of hurt and heartbreak in order to situate his own feelings as those of the suffering victim. This self pity may at first work. We may feel the pain of the narrator and suppose that it is his absent lover’s fault that is is suffering.

It also feminises his predicament and this I believe annoys him too. He is aggrieved that Porphyria has another life beyond him and this resentment serves to inspire his secret plans to kill her in order to control her once and for all.

Look at the use of the verb ‘glided’ when Porphyria arrives at his cottage. Does it suggests her ethereal beauty, her aristocratic bearing and therefore her unavailability or elusiveness from the jealous lover?

Does it suggest a self assurance, an insouciance that beguiles AND exasperates?

Or is it ironically giving expression to her haunting beauty and movement? She seems dreamlike to a lover who longs for her yet we suspect resents her beauty and her other life. 

Yet there may be another, more chilling reason for the choice of the verb ‘glided’.

Perhaps the speaker is already viewing her as a ghost as he is silently plotting her murder. She is about to become truly spectral! The verb thus anticipates the act he is about to commit. It may be a Freudian slip of course  or worse still, he may be savouring secretly the knowledge of what he is about to do. He is thus a premeditated  killer, who enjoys contemplating his powers.

Yet as I have said, the lover plays with the idea of spontaneity as it renders him passionate and reckless rather than cold hearted and sadistic. It seems to me a game, a game brilliantly expressed through the ambiguity of the language released from the consciousness of the lover.

But let’s go back to the ways in which the poem subtly changes  the readers’    allegiances and sympathies.

As soon as  Porphyria comes to the cottage to see her lover, a shift begins to happen  as the reader develops a different view of Porphyria. Despite the lover’s resentment, we see through his  language to the  revelation of  her  care and industry, ‘all the cottage warm’ . Her quietly seething lover  starts to irritate the reader with his ‘cheerless grate’ and ‘no voice’, both  suggesting  sulkiness and petulance.

Why has he no fire? Why is his grate so unnecessarily ‘cheerless’?This seems a situation  designed to extract guilt and pity from his nocturnal visitor. It symbolises his suffering,  his withdrawal from the heat and vitality of life.

It also points to a deliberate strategy to ensnare his visitor into carrying out servile tasks for him whilst he watches her voyeuristically.

In fact, the lover’s recriminatory  silence takes on a careful, malignant aspect with retrospect as it gives presence to the silent, predatory gaze of the narrator. We feel that Porphyria is being watched and watched in a disturbing, cruelly ‘hungry’ manner. We too, feel uneasy with this devouring gaze. Are we being made complicit with the lover? 

Porphyria is aware of the silence of her lover and deliberately places his ‘arm about her waist’ and makes her ‘smooth white shoulder bare’ ironically objectifying her own bodily beauty and transforming herself into a sacrificial spectacle and victim, as she tries to placate her moody lover.

Our role as reader is also mixed up with that of the spectator, even that of the  voyeur as Porphyria seeks to placate her difficult lover, with her tenderly erotic  ministrations. This ‘pale’ awaiting lover has a sexual allure perhaps, or a capacity for soliciting pity, ‘all for the love of her’, that makes Porphyria visit her most dangerously possessive lover on this ill fated evening. 

The lover accepts the ministrations without any external comment. Silence is a form of power, controlling power. Yet we hear the processing of Porphyria’s avowals through the consciousness of the narrator. There is something bizarre and unsettling about this process as it seems concerned  with reassurances that are not quite congruent with the situation. There is a strangely unsettling emphasis on himself and his pride.

How far can we trust his revelation that ‘she worshipped me’ or indeed that she is bound by ‘vainer ties’? True, she may be married or a member of some family who do not embrace the lover’s romantic intentions happily. He is one of those people who likes to keep intimates feeling that they lack the capacity to meet their love in full.They wield their power through withdrawal. 

Porpyria will not doubt have felt on many occasions that she falls short with regard to his capacity for ‘real’ love.  Everything we hear is due to the voice of the narrator who is secretly plotting  to murder his lover. Surely he is not a reliable reader of situations or emotions? He is a paranoid narrator who lures us in with the unsuspecting Porphyria. 

Like the Duke in My Last Duchess, the lover is arrogantly self justifying and cruel.

The facile rhyme of ‘grew’ and ‘do’ is self consciously clumsy, creating an awkwardness that I feel the narrator enjoys. He likes to linger over his  thoughts as they supposedly build up into spontaneous actions, actions whose spontaneity generate the feeling of a passionate  loss of control.  This seems too self consciously  deliberate to be spontaneous and suggests he is already   decided upon his strategy. As the text is in any case retrospective  there is a sense that the replaying of this whole event gives pleasure, even of a sexual kind to the speaker. 

The banality of ‘a thing to do’ where murder is a mere ‘thing’ and an activity only worth naming through the verb ‘to do’ seems macabre and purposeful  in its facile ‘jokiness’. He could just so easily have been talking about taking a short walk or moving an ornament from one place to another. 

There is a banal fastidiousness about the choice of expression, a fastidiousness an actor such as John Malkovich would play exceptionally well.

The hair is the instrument of murder; the tool so inventively employed to destroy. The choice of murder weapon seems likely to be a deliberately ironic, fetishistic choice by the lover. Porphyria loves her hair he feels too much. It signifies he beauty, her power, her status in the world at large beyond his control.

She loves her hair  more than him, so her fitting punishment is enacted through her proud pleasure. ‘Three times’ shows how he has worked out precisely what effort  will kill her successfully. It is a mystical number too, associated with the trinity. This time he reveals a most unholy trinity! 

We wonder what Porphyria feels as he winds her hair around her neck. Does she mistake this gesture for erotic tenderness? Is it something they have played out before? Or is she in fact terrified  Remember the lover is silent on her reaction. he does not tell us as it is irrelevant to his purpose and his assigned version of events.

The lover assures the listeners and himself that she ‘felt no pain.’ Is this true of strangulation which surely involves a desperate effort to fight for the breath-a primal urge?   Surely we have only his word and that is the word of a killer and possible madman? I could even suggest that he is lingering again over the details of her death as he obtains pleasure from such a carefully recollected  recital.  She felt no pain. He could even be lying for the pleasure of deceit! 

The poem is about deception and its link to erotic pleasure of the most violent and disturbing kind.

And  where are we positioned at both the beginning and end of the poem? We are sat cosily with a lover who is intimately embracing  the body of the woman he has just killed. How grotesque is that?  All we are reassured is  apparently peaceful and ironically ‘God has said not a word’ . This throwaway  irony at the poem’s conclusion repulses with its heavy irony and humour.  The speaker feels exonerated because the world has not retaliated and punished him for his actions. He even feels safe with God’s judgement- heavy irony we wonder  schizophrenic delusion or just another example of his egocentric sadism?  

Creepy as hell in every sense!