Andrew's Wiki
Porphyrias Lover

Content

• Another way of “Dealing” with passion by saying it’s Classical
• Porphyria comes in on a windy dark rainy night and zap! zammo! turns the home into a warm hearth full of love and light; she comes to him but her heart is “too weak…to set its struggling passion free.” She won’t “give herself to me for ever,” but she does admit she loves him.
  • She cuddles up to him, and he strangles her. Sex and death.
    • Because she is “mine, mine” he decides he can do whatever he wants to her
    • “Only this time” he props up HER head instead of before, when she propped him up. I suppose he kills her b/c she had too much power in the relationship: she was the one in control, and now that she finally relinquishes it, he goes overboard in the opposite direction. Also, the fact that he says “I found something to do” and the fact that the first part of the poem he does nothing, totally passive, it means that he’s merely ACTING upon her, becoming a subject by making her an object in a literal way. Can see it as a metaphor for the way men used to treat women or at least the dangers of love.
    • His excuses: it didn’t hurt her, and it was her “utmost will.” How could you think that? He thinks that her “passion” wants her to reject everything for him, so killing her is doing that: erasing everything, even Life, for him
• Various Interpretations: straightforward man murdering woman; perhaps the man was impotent and thus killed her; perhaps the persona was a woman instead of a man and thus couldn’t have normal relationship; might have had financial disparity (“vainer ties”); erotic asphyxiation rather than actual murder; or “porphyria” being its literal meaning, “disease” not a real person

Form

• Dramatic monologue like My Last Duchess
• ababb
• Last line: “And yet God has not said a word:” another hideous act b/c not punished