Porphyria's Lover Analysis

Year 9 English Essay Task

“The concepts of love and war are similar but in the variant contexts they can also reflect divergent ideas.”

The concepts of love and war are inextricably linked with the similar attributes and emotions that are concomitant to each idea, however their paradoxical relationship suggests divergent ideas when involved in variant contexts. The love poem, ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ by Robert Browning conflates passion and violence, reflecting notions of obsessions, hunger for ownership and abusiveness within a relationship whilst Bruce Dawe’s ‘Homecoming’ investigates the anonymity and insensitivity for the deaths of the soldiers involved in the war and the destructive characteristics of this concept. Nevertheless, the
The context of love poetry presents facets of consuming emotions and passion and a craving for dominance and power. Robert Browning’s ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ tells a story of a romantic affair set in the Victorian era of a beautiful woman named Porphyria and her lover, whom murders her in the wish of preserving her love for him forever. The poet has used a very structured rhyme scheme through out the poem and this displays the rigid and controlling nature of the relationship Porphyria is in, reinforcing the notion of violence and hunger for power. Foreshadowing the violence to come further on in the poem is the vehement imagery, pathetic fallacy and personification in “the sullen wind was soon awake/it tore the elm-tops down for spite/and did its worst to vex the lake”. The wrath and fury used to present the setting introduces the idea of a darker side of love and
‘Homecoming’ by Bruce Dawe creates an explicitly Australian cultural context of the soldiers who fought in the Vietnam War, and their deceased bodies being collected and sent home. The irony within the title demonstrates the opposing emotions of happiness and sadness through the warmth normally associated with home versus the notion of death and decay displayed in the poem. This illustrates that the warmth associated with love can be overshadowed by negative emotions often connected with aspects of war such as grief and sorrow Additionally, the repetition of “they’re” supports the notion of the anonymity and loss of identity of the soldiers who have died in the war, and it also highlights the repetitive, ongoing process of the discarding of these dead heroes, further dehumanising them due to the insensitive manner of their disposal. This loss of identity of the soldiers amongst the mass of dead bodies can be compared to the loss of identity within a romantic relationship, where an individual may attempt to alter their personality to please their lover. Towards the end of the poem Dawe writes, “Telegrams tremble like leaves from a wintering tree”. The use of personification in this line highlights the potency and power of war and death and by making a non-living object a subject to this power, which further accentuates the desensitising nature of war. This further