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Porphyria's Lover And My Last Duchess Essay

1962 Words8 Pages

The Victorian Era characterized by religion, romanticism and confusion gave rise to many works that tried to express these themes. Robert Browning’s poems “Porphyria’s Lover” and “My Last Duchess” are an example of works focused on romanticism and confusion. These two dramatic monologues focus on the love and psychological stress lovers get from their partners. Feelings of insecurity, possession, jealousy, and egoism are deep rooted into the plot of these poems. However these poems approach the concept of love differently from two contrasting perspectives. On one side we have “Porphyria’s Lover” who’s speaker is deeply obsessed with Porphyria and will not share her with anyone in the world. He is deeply loyal to Porphyria and constantly shows how much he loves her. In contrast “My Last Duchess” we have Duke of Ferrara reminiscing about his dead wife who he murdered. He speaks about the motive to kill her and he reveals himself as an egotistical husband. He seeks his wife’s appreciation and is not contempt with how much she appreciates him. By analyzing the language, setting and personalities of the characters we will be able to see how love has affected these two lovers differently. Nevertheless we will also be able to …show more content…

Throughout the poem he speaks of the tragic murder as if he feels no pain. We can see this by looking at the vocabulary used, for example words like: worshipped me(line 33), she was mine (line 36) murmuring how she loved me (line 21). All these words are very comforting, fooling the reader into thinking the speaker is a genuine lover. However as the poem progresses and he begins to reveal his egoistic side. We come to the realization that he is a psychotic person blinded by his obsessive love for Porphyria. Confident that he has found his true love, Porphyria’s lover shows his happiness in the following way, “Happy and proud; at last I

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