Robert Browning’s poem “Porphyria’s Lover” first appeared in 1936, and it was later republished in his landmark collection of 1842, Dramatic Lyrics. Though Browning called the poems in this collection “lyrics,” critics today refer to them as “monologues.” Like lyrics, dramatic monologues have first-person speakers who reflect on their experience, but they are more driven by narrative and place special emphasis on the speaker’s psychology. Browning was particularly fascinated with abnormal psychologies, and his speakers tend to be sinister and deranged. In the case of “Porphyria’s Lover,” the speaker is a violent and self-deluded man who presents himself as perfectly rational. Taking on tropes from Romantic poetry, the speaker recounts how, on a dark and stormy night, his lover came to his cottage, lit a fire in his fireplace, and embraced him. This woman, named Porphyria, loves the speaker, but due to societal constraints she can’t officially be with him. Claiming that it was her “darling one wish” (line 57) to submit to him, the speaker strangles Porphyria with her own hair, then sits with her corpse by the fireside. The poem’s shocking violence spotlights the patriarchal logic of Victorian morality, which insisted that women belonged under men’s control.

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