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The opening lines of “Porphyria’s Lover” establish the poem’s setting as a cozy lakeside cottage on dark and stormy night. This set-up introduces an opposition between outdoors, which is cold and inhospitable, and indoors, which is warm and safe. The speaker further emphasizes this distinction between outdoors and indoors upon Porphyria’s arrival. After entering the cottage, Porphyria strips away the protective layers of cold-weather garb and tends to the fire (lines 7–9):

            She shut the cold out and the storm,
     And kneeled and made the cheerless grate
            Blaze up, and all the cottage warm

By stoking the fire in this way, Porphyria affirms the traditional Victorian logic that associates women with hearth and home. Yet just as Porphyria makes “the cheerless grate / Blaze up,” so too does she enflame the speaker’s passion. As the reader will soon see, this blaze of passion will trouble the initial opposition that associated the indoors with warmth and safety. Indeed, that initial association, which is so conventional as to be a cliché, is little more than a lure. For the speaker’s passion ultimately leads him to flip the script entirely by violently murdering Porphyria, and so demonstrating just how unsafe the home can be—particularly for women.

Next section Themes

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