Porphyria's Lover Flashcards
Describe the form and the rhyme scheme of the poem
The form of the poem is one continuous stanza, but there is a regular rhyme scheme (ababb), where the alternating rhymes of abab find themselves disturbed every fifth line by the repetition of the b rhyme.
What does the rhyme scheme reflect?
The rhyme scheme reflects the orderly and calmly rational aspect of the speaker, but that additional b rhyme hints at the disturbed quality to his mind.
Which meter is used?
“Porphyria’s Lover” is written in iambic tetrameter.
Themes
The violent climax of “Porphyria’s Lover” comes as a shock: right in the middle of a tender moment, the speaker suddenly decides to strangle Porphyria, the woman he loves. Many critics have argued that the speaker is mad and that he kills Porphyria for a set of perverse reasons: he wants to fulfill (what he thinks) Porphyria’s “one wish” to fully surrender herself to him, and to make this loving moment last forever. The speaker presents love as a form of total submission, and violence as a means of control.
At the beginning of the poem Porphyria is portrayed as a very active and independent woman, but once once she gives into he passion, her status changes. She stops being an independent person. The speaker describes her as “mine, mine, fair, / Perfectly pure and good.” The repetition of the world “mine” emphasizes that Porphyria has become a possession, an object, something owned by the speaker. When she is dead, she ceases to have the control and agency she displayed earlier in the poem. As a result, she cannot remove herself from his embrace and she is turned into a passive object. And in his twisted mind, he’s done the right thing, he granted his lover’s “one wish” to be with him forever.
Despite the speaker’s violent and disturbing crime, he appears to go unpunished: as he announces triumphantly in the poem’s final line, “And yet God has not said a word!”.
For the speaker, it seems this silence means that God approves of his decision to murder Porphyria, since doing so forever keeps her “perfectly pure and good.” Essentially, the speaker thinks that by murdering Porphyria he prevents her from sinning; by killing Porphyria, the speaker prevents her from straying into sexual acts that might endanger her soul’s status with God.
Taken in context, the poem might be a subtle criticism of the hypocrisy of the early-Victorian society, a very religious world that seemed to outwardly condemn any moral deviance, mainly related to female sexuality, which was particularly restricted and controlled.
