Comparing Poems 'Porphyria's Lover And' My Last

The Loss of Victorian Morality

The Victorian era marks the period of Queen Victoria’s reign over England from 1837, until her death in January 1901. It was an age of new prosperity brought about by thriving industrialization, new scientific discoveries and technology, which encouraged the rise of an educated middle class. This new age also brought about a shift from agriculture to manufacturing, causing mass immigration into cities. City life provided Victorians with freedom and anonymity from the social values of smaller rural communities, and resulted in the loss of social and spiritual morality with violence, poverty and carnality becoming routine occurrences. New cultural ideals and scientific findings, such as evolution, clashed with
He used sex, violence and moral hypocrisy as themes in many of his poems. Browning, like Charles Dickens, filled his literary works with people from all levels of society and he also included characters that were immoral and evil. According to The Literature Network, “Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues covered a wide array of subjects, from lucid dreams to the nature of art and even the meaning of existence.” His poems “Porphyria’s Lover” and “My Last Duchess,” are similar in that they both include murderers who coldly describe their evil deeds without any remorse. “Porphyria’s Lover”, begins with a lover describing the arrival of Porphyria, and then it quickly descends into a description of her murder at his hands. He describes how he strangled his lover with her own hair to preserve the moment forever. The poem “My Last Duchess” also echoes this theme of depravity. The Duke describes his last wife, whose painting is hidden behind a curtain on the wall, and cheerfully mentions that his wife seemed to smile at everyone, so he “…gave commands; Then all smiles stopped together” (Browning
Arnold is living in an era of change, and while he determines that faith and religion no longer provide answers or meaning to his life, he has nothing to replace it with. In “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse” he finds that he is “wandering between two worlds” (Arnold 85); the world of religion which he has deemed as “dead” (Arnold 85) and the new scientific knowledge and beliefs that are unable to fill the void left by the loss of faith, and are too “powerless to be born.”(Arnold 86) Arnold laments that if the time for faith and spiritual fulfillment has passed, then why can’t science “take away, At least, the restlessness, (and) the pain” (Arnold 103). He is cynical about his own time period and questions the ability of society to make spiritual or moral sense of the new modern era. Arnold’s concerns for future generations reflect the turmoil caused by booming industrialization. He suggests that religion should provide moral guidance and a social safety net during chaotic times of change, and although scientific knowledge and advancements appear to make the concept of faith obsolete, there will always be the necessity for balance between religion and science. Warren Anderson states that “…no other poem of the nineteenth or even the twentieth century captures the isolation of modern