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Browning's Porphyria's Lover.

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From: The Explicator
Date: 20020101
Author:Ross, Catherine

Many of Robert Browning's early poems were part of what Isobel Armstrong has called a "systematic attempt to examine many kinds of neurotic or insane behavior, and in particular the pathology of sexual feeling" (Armstrong 288). Paired with a companion poem, "Johannes Agricola," under the title Madhouse Cells, "Porphyria's Lover"(1836) is one of the earliest products of this project. The standard reading of this monologue is that the poem's insane narrator, Porphyria's unnamed lover, has murdered her in order to possess her completely or, perhaps, to freeze in time a moment of ...

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