Kirra Leslie
Mitchell
English 12/7
Porphyria's Lover Poetry Response
The word "lover" has so many connotations. When people are lovers, there is a mutual feeling of love between them and that is normally a good thing. Obviously, the word lover also refers to sexual partners; whether that be genuine love or quick pleasure. A lover could also refer to a person that is having an affair, who possibly feels more passionately about the affair than the other person. In the poem, "Porphyria's Lover" by Robert Browning, it tackles this word from a very different angle. It describes a lover as a person who was corrupted by society; a person that worships their "lover" to an extreme. So much so that the other person has nothing to do but abruptly end the moment right then. The poem begins with a man living in a cottage by himself.
A raging storm begins and the speaker expresses that he is close to heart break. Directly after this, a Lover named Porphyria "glides" in. She immediately sits down and dries off from the storm. The way the poem progresses from this point is almost unsettling. Porphyria just immediately begins to "offer her bare shoulder" and murmur how she loves [him] in a sensual manner. The reader can tell the narrator does not feel the same way Porphyria does. This is one definition of the word "lover" as described earlier: someone who feels a different way about the "loving" that is going on. At this point, the narrator realizes Porphyria worships him. He found the only thing he could do was "In one long yellow string I wound/ Three times her little throat around,/ and I strangled her". That is all the narrator could think to do. It also...