Porphyria's Lover
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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- ... 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.
Porphyria's Lover is an early poem by Robert Browning that was first published as "Porphyria" in the January 1836 issue of Monthly Repository. Browning later republished it in Dramatic Lyrics (1842) paired with "Johannes Agricola in Meditation" under the title "Madhouse Cells." The poem did not receive its definitive title until the 1860s.
"Porphyria's Lover" is Browning's first short dramatic monologue, and also the first of his poems to examine abnormal psychology. Although its initial publication passed nearly unnoticed and it received little critical attention in the nineteenth century, the poem is now heavily anthologised and much studied.
A possible inspiration for the poem is John Wilson's "Extracts from Gosschen's Diary", a lurid account of a murder published in Blackwood's Magazine in 1818. A man knifes a woman to death, talks of the corpse's blue eyes, golden hair, and white breasts, and describes the feeling of perfect happiness the murder gives him. Although he stabs her repeatedly, the woman never cries out. Browning's friend and fellow poet Bryan Procter acknowledged basing his 1820 "Marcian Colonna" on this source, but added a new detail; after the murder, the killer sits up all night with his victim.
Summary
The poem consists of one long stanza, written in a simple, conversational style, but with a strictly maintained rhyme and meter. The narrator is an apparent madman who sits embracing a woman he claims to have murdered the night before. Porphyria, he says, came to his cottage, kindled a fire, then sat beside him and told him she loved him. He then killed her by strangling her with her own hair; he did this, he explains, so that Porphyria could be his forever, in an eternal state of love.
