Porphyria's Lover | That Moment in Porphyria’s Lover
In the following essay, Walker examines how
Browning is able to fuse diverse elements into “poetic
coherence” in “Porphyria’s Lover.”
The young Robert Browning manages remarkable mileage from nine sentences worth of the distracted reflections of “Porphyria’s Lover.” The poem is at once a murder shocker featuring a madman strangling a comely blond, a sociologist’s case study of inability to communicate in a sexual relationship, a glimpse at the impact of artificial social values upon individual lives, a presodium pentathol excursion into the mind of an apparently motiveless killer, a convincing speculation as to why all men destroy the thing they love. Browning’s fusion of such diverse forces into poetic...
[The entire page is 1691 words long]
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