Eventhough Robert Browning was the husband of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, their style of writing was very different from one another. In popular opinion, Elizabeth was more popular than her husband. Robert, like his wife grew up wealthy and he stayed at home with his family for many years. His work was not noted until after he died. One of my favorite poems by Browing is Porphyria's Lover. This poem starts out being a wonderful tale of how love is supposed to be. A man is waiting in a cottage for his lover. His lover is caught up in what society says about their love and how she really feels for him. Clearly he is afraid that society will win so he kills her and lays by her side for an entire night and he wonders why God has not punished him for doing so. This poem is gruesome and very different from what his wife would have written. It makes me wonder if he sometimes thought this way of his own wife being that often she was more famous as a poet than he was eventhough she was an invalid. It seems as if the roles are reversed in this poem. He is the one who is in the bed and she has to come in and get the fire going and warm him up. It shows that he loves her and he is happy to know that she loves him, but he wants to somehow keep her there forever in love with him. He writes:
Too weak, for all her hearts endeavour,
To set its struggling passion free
From pride, and vainer ties dissever,
And give herself to me forever. (line 22-25)
He was afraid to lose her. I think this is ironic because he lost his wife and it meant that he would probably be nothing without her.
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This is an interesting post. You're right, Browning wrote poetry that was completely different from Elizabeth's poetry. One thing about Browning, though, is that he had Elizabeth; they fell in love and were married, so personally I don't think that he was haunted by the idea of not having her as this character is.
ReplyDeleteI too did a post on this particular poem and I found a bit of a different view point. I never made the connection that he was talking about his wife. I took it more as a warning to anyone that you never really know what someone is thinking until it is too late. In this situation a girl who had run off with a man that society does not approve, whom she finds out is someone who would rather kill her than fight for her.
ReplyDeleteI thought that this poem represented a real life relationship in which each individual goes through jealousy, falling in love, and admiration. I found it interesting that you mentioned society's view of their relationship. Usually society's input does tend to conjure those type of feelings.
ReplyDeleteI found this poem to relate to any love situation, he may have meant his wife for himself, But it is a poem that his home for so many people, Love is a hard thing to grasp and so many emotions and mixed feelings get put into the mix, So I think the author wanted to show an extreme version of someone wanting to keep that perfect moment from being ruined by human error, and the best way to destroy human error is to destroy the human.
ReplyDeleteWhen I read this poem it was disturbing how the man could do something so selfish. No matter how much you miss someone, killing them is not the way to solve the problem. But then again there are some crazy people in the world who might do these crazy things.
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