Porphyria's Lover is typical of Robert Browning's dramatic
            monologues in that the poems reveal as much about the dramatic narrators as about the
            putative subjects of the poem. Several other poems by Browning, of which the best known
            is probably "My Last Duchess", start with what appears to be a narrator describing his
            love for a woman. The opening of "Porphyria's Lover" is foreboding, with the weather
            mirroring the narrator's mood of despair. When Porphyria first appears, the mood changes
            to tender and romantic:
When glided in Porphyria; straight
            
She shut the cold out and the storm,
And kneeled and made the
            cheerless grate 
Blaze up, and all the cottage
            warm;
but the lover's jealousy eventually prevails, and the
            violence foreshadowed by the opening surfaces:
Made my
            heart swell, and still it grew 
While I debated what to do.
That
            moment she was mine, mine, fair,
Perfectly pure and good: I found
A
            thing to do, and all her hair
In one long yellow string l wound
            
Three times her little throat around,
And strangled
            her.
The mood of peace at the end, with the narrator
            sitting with the corpse of Porphyria and the voice of God (and perhaps weather) quiet,
            adds an eerie twist to the poem.
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