Comparison of 'My Last Duchass' and 'Porphryia's Lover'
Love poetry Coursework Assignment
The two poems that I have chosen are ‘Porphyria’s lover,’ a twisted story about a possessive lover who wants this moment of love to never end and ‘My Last Duchess’ where a Duke tells about his wife who he had killed whilst showing a painting of her to a guest. I chose these poems because they were the ones that I found the most interesting and that intrigued me the most. The poems are quite similar but at the same time have some differences. One way in which the poems are similar is that they are both written by Robert Browning.
The ways in which the poems begin are quite different. In ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ Robert Browning starts by setting the scene, the mood at the beginning of the poem is very cold and gloomy as he describes the weather outside, using a personification of the wind, ‘the sullen wind was soon awake,’ but then as Porphyria enters the room the mood changes at once bringing warmth to poem, ‘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,’ I think this contrast in settings is very powerful and gives the reader a vivid but simple picture in their head. Whereas in ‘My last duchess’ I think that mood is quite bleak and stays like that throughout the poem as the Duke begins by showing off a painting of his wife to a guest and says that she looks as if she were alive, this immediately tells us that she is dead. In both poems there are similarities in the narrator’s attitudes towards the woman. We learn a lot about the male’s feelings and thoughts in both poems as they are both narrated by the male lover’s. The men in both poems are very possessive over their lovers and feel superior to them. In ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ the narrator shows strong emotions for Porphyria revealing his romantic feelings for her, in contrast the Duke in ‘My Last Duchess’ is a very cold mannered formal man who didn’t understand his wife and
The two poems that I have chosen are ‘Porphyria’s lover,’ a twisted story about a possessive lover who wants this moment of love to never end and ‘My Last Duchess’ where a Duke tells about his wife who he had killed whilst showing a painting of her to a guest. I chose these poems because they were the ones that I found the most interesting and that intrigued me the most. The poems are quite similar but at the same time have some differences. One way in which the poems are similar is that they are both written by Robert Browning.
The ways in which the poems begin are quite different. In ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ Robert Browning starts by setting the scene, the mood at the beginning of the poem is very cold and gloomy as he describes the weather outside, using a personification of the wind, ‘the sullen wind was soon awake,’ but then as Porphyria enters the room the mood changes at once bringing warmth to poem, ‘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,’ I think this contrast in settings is very powerful and gives the reader a vivid but simple picture in their head. Whereas in ‘My last duchess’ I think that mood is quite bleak and stays like that throughout the poem as the Duke begins by showing off a painting of his wife to a guest and says that she looks as if she were alive, this immediately tells us that she is dead. In both poems there are similarities in the narrator’s attitudes towards the woman. We learn a lot about the male’s feelings and thoughts in both poems as they are both narrated by the male lover’s. The men in both poems are very possessive over their lovers and feel superior to them. In ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ the narrator shows strong emotions for Porphyria revealing his romantic feelings for her, in contrast the Duke in ‘My Last Duchess’ is a very cold mannered formal man who didn’t understand his wife and