Comparison Between Porphyrias Lover and the Laboratory by Robert Browning

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The poems Porphyria’s Lover and The Laboratory both by Robert Browning are both quite simillar in the way he tells them and sets the scene/setting are different in several ways. Porphyria’s Lover is about a man who is in love with a woman who is from a rich upper-class family so cannot stay or be seen with him. So one night when she goes to see him, he kills her, so that she cannot leave him again. The Laboratory is about a woman whose boyfriend has left her or another girl. She then wants revenge. She decides to do this by poisoning his new girlfriend so she can have him for herself. She then gets carried away and also tries to kill everyone around the new girlfriend. The two poems are similar because they are both about love and wanting something for yourself, and selfishness. This may be a theme/genre that Browning enjoys and writes a lot of. He may also be talking about his love for his wife; Elizabeth Barrett Browning. When the two first met, Browning was “lower-class” than his wife; as she was a very good and well know poet and he was not, this may have had some input into the story behind Porphyria’s Lover. He may have been writing it to convey his love of his wife and how he doesn’t want to let her ever leave him, and he would do anything to make sure she did stay with him until they died. Furthermore, both poems betray women as bad people. For instance in Porphyria’s Lover his lover acts quite slutty around him; “and made her smooth white shoulder bare,” – this shows that she may have only been in the relationship for an arteria motive. In The Laboratory the woman wants to kill for her revenge and also kill innocent people for fun. He may portray women in this way as women were seen as a “lower-class” to men at the time that the poem was written. When writing The Laboratory Browning will have looked at what people wanted to read. Not long before him

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