The rain set early in to-night,
       The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
       And did its worst to vex the lake:
       I listened with heart fit to break.

The speaker opens the poem with these lines, which set the scene with the well-worn Romantic trope of the dark and stormy night. The speaker subtly personifies the wind as “sullen” and violent, and in doing so foreshadows how his own evident gloominess will later awaken into passionate violence against his lover, Porphyria. But despite foreshadowing the speaker’s subsequent loss of control, it’s worth noting that his speech here is characterized by near-perfect metrical regularity. Aside from the final verse, every line here is written in exact iambic tetrameter. Furthermore, the grammatical units of the sentence spoken here all align neatly with the ending of each line, which helps spotlight the perfectly regular rhymes. The speaker is thus in disturbingly perfect control of his language as he embarks on an account of his murder of Porphyria.

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;
       Which done, she rose, and from her form
Withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl,
       And laid her soiled gloves by, untied
Her hat and let the damp hair fall,
       And, last, she sat down by my side
       And called me.

In lines 6–15, Porphyria arrives at the cottage, lights a fire, and takes off her winter garments. Porphyria’s entrance into the poem is marked by metrical disruption. Her very name, “Por-phy-ri-a,” subtly disrupts the poem’s iambic rhythm. Her arrival also disturbs the alignment between discrete grammatical units and lines of verse. Hence the appearance of a semicolon immediately after the poem’s first major metrical hiccup. This semicolon creates an awkward pause before the final syllable of the line, and it forces the poem’s first instance of enjambment: “When glided in Porphyria; straight / She shut the cold out and the storm.” Aside from the metrical significance of her name, it’s also important to note that “Porphyria” derives from a Greek word meaning “fire-bearer.” It’s therefore appropriate that she should light a fire, bringing a touch of feminine warmth to an otherwise cold, masculine space. This action also marks her as conventionally Victorian, in the sense that the Victorian period make strong moral links between women and the home. Yet Porphyria is also unconventional in the overt expression of sexuality that she offers as strips off her winter garments and sidles up suggestively to the speaker.

Be sure I looked up at her eyes
       Happy and proud; at last I knew
Porphyria worshipped me; surprise
       Made my heart swell, and still it grew
       While I debated what to do.
That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
       Perfectly pure and good: I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
       In one long yellow string I wound
       Three times her little throat around,
And strangled her. No pain felt she;
       I am quite sure she felt no pain.

Lines 31–42 recount the events leading up to and including the speaker’s strangulation of Porphyria. What’s key to note here is the logical progression of the speaker’s thoughts. It isn’t entirely clear whether it’s Porphyria’s eyes that are “happy and proud,” or if the speaker’s describing his own experience of receiving her gaze. But either way, this moment convinces the speaker that “Porphyria worshipped me,” and that she was somehow ready to “give herself over” to him. This interpretation of Porphyria’s gaze convinces the speaker that “she was mine, mine.” The repetition of “mine” here strongly implies that what the speaker has wanted all along is for Porphyria not simply to love him, but to belong to him. This interpretation helps explain why, immediately after laying claim to Porphyria, the speaker murders her. Yet at the very end of the passage quoted here, the speaker reveals just how deluded he is. As if killing Porphyria to ensure his possession of her wasn’t bad enough, the speaker has the gall to tell himself that she felt no pain when he strangled her with her own hair. Curiously, however, his need to say it twice makes it clear that he doesn’t quite believe it himself.

Porphyria's love: she guessed not how
       Her darling one wish would be heard.
And thus we sit together now,
       And all night long we have not stirred,
       And yet God has not said a word!

The speaker concludes the poem with these lines (56–60), where he continues to delude himself into believing that he murdered Porphyria for her benefit. Earlier in the poem, the speaker recounts how Porphyria expressed her love for him. At the same time, she also explained that she was “too weak, for all her heart’s endeavour, / To set its struggling passion free . . . And give herself to me for ever” (lines 22–25). The speaker takes these lines to mean that Porphyria wanted to submit herself entirely to him, but simply couldn’t summon the will to do so. Now, at the poem’s end, the speaker implies that by killing her, he has fulfilled the highest aim of “Porphyria’s love[,] . . . Her darling one wish,” which was for him to possess her. He then goes further, suggesting that God’s silence on the matter indicates His tacit approval of the speaker’s perverse logic. However, the reader may also interpret the poem’s final line as an attempt on Browning’s part to critique Victorian morality. Indeed, God’s silence about the murder may simply indicate that God doesn’t exist, and that the speaker justifies his actions by appealing to the twisted moral authority of his own era.

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