Porphyria's Lover
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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... I found --Porphyria's Lover (1836) by Robert Browning |
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Porphyria's Lover (1836) 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."
"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.
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.
