Comparing Poems 'My Last Duchess And' Porphyria's Lover

At its heart, Browning’s poems explores the destructive and productive capacity of art in life. Both ‘My Last Duchess’ and ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ communicate art as a means of control, using the male gaze to objectify women. However, in ‘A Toccata of Galuppi’s’, Browning invites the reader to scrutinise beneath the surface of aesthetics and confront mortality.

‘My Last Duchess’ reveals the Duke’s struggle for authority, which results in the Duchess becoming a literal piece of art. From the outset, the Duke appears to be engaging the envoy with small talk. However, Browning has created a structure of reality below this fiction that maps onto questions about the destructive role of art in life through the symbolism offered by the bronze statue

From the details that provided the actions of the wind, such as the “sullen”, “ awake” and “vex”, the reader can determine the use of a pathetic fallacy. Browning’s diction for the weather sets a gloomy tone from the beginning, foreshadowing the sinister forthcoming events in the poem. Browning has attributed human characteristics with a natural element to display the connection between the wind and the lover’s own behaviour. When Porphyria arrives at the cottage and tends to the fire, the speaker watches silently. Browning demonstrates the speaker perceiving Porphyria as an object of pleasure as he is being overly engrossed in her beauty. The speaker describes Porphyria’s “smooth white shoulder”, “yellow hair” and how she is “perfectly pure”. This repetition of ‘p’ is peaceful and innocent, much like Porphyria. However, the erratic ABABB rhyme scheme emulated the speaker’s insanity. When they are finally together by the fire, the speaker is overwhelmed with pleasure by this ideal moment. To both immortalise the moment and preserve her in her pure form eternally, the speaker strangles her with her own hair. The pattern of the narrators’ need for power in Browning’s poems is represented once again when the speaker states that “her darling one wish [is] heard”. In this way, he is speaking for Porphyria as the dramatic monologue only presents his view. Fundamentally, Browning is building on ‘My Last Duchess’ to contend that in addition to gazing, consuming art in abundance renders it as a destructive role in one’s