Comparison Of Porphoria's Lover And My Last Duches

2475 Words10 Pages
Compare And Contrast ‘My Last Duchess’ And ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ On the Issue of Love ‘My Last Duchess’ and ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ are poems which were written by Robert Browning during the Victorian period. The poems expose the failure of a relationship and the complex nature of love between a man and a woman. The aspects of jealousy, vanity, pride, obsessive desire, beauty, and flirtatious behaviour are depicted in both poems. The poems were written in the form of a dramatic monologue; this gives the reader an insight into the narrator’s inner thoughts and motives when involved in a particular situation. Using this literary technique, Browning allows the reader to explore the abnormal psychology of the two speakers and also to get closely involved with two acts of murder. In ‘Porphyria's Lover’ Browning gives the reader a dramatic insight into the twisted mind of an abnormally possessive lover, who wishes the moment of love to last forever; while ‘My Last Duchess’ gives an insight in the love a possessive husband has for his beautiful, supposedly flirtatious wife. The men end up murdering their objects of desire, the women, because they are unable to control the women and come to term with the intense feelings they have for them. ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ illustrates the relationship in an affair while ‘My Last Duchess’ portrays the relationship in a marriage. Both the poems are long single stanza poems which consist of lines that are irregular in length. The language in ‘Poryphyria’s Lover’ is natural, much less formal and the cadence or rhythm of the poem mimics that of natural speech. The rhyming scheme of ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ is ABABB; this makes it more fluent and in tune with the passion felt by the lover. Porphyria’s lover describes his heart to be in a state ‘fit to break’ and his kiss to be ‘burning’; this intensity and the asymmetry of the
Open Document