Abstract

Robert Browning is, one of the two leading Victorian poet. Although Browning did not invent the dramatic monologue, he expanded its possibilities for serious psychological and philosophical expression, and he will always be considered a master of the dramatic poem. In this paper we try to focus on the Robert browning work of "my last duchess" and " Porphyria's Lover" and compare his work.

Robert Browning

Introduction

From the perspective of the present, Browning claims a place of first importance as a proto-modernist, a writer who anticipated some of the major developments in art and literature occurring at the beginning of the twentieth century. His use of the dramatic monologue anticipated and to a degree influenced the limited and unreliable narration of such masterpieces of modernism as Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902) and Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier (1915). His conception of relativistic and fragmented worlds in which a character is not at home anticipated the vision of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922). His sense of character, defined by the conflict between social roles and internal impulses held in a sometimes unstable equilibrium, was confirmed by modern psychology. Browning is most interesting when seen not as a Victorian sage but as a forerunner of modernism.

Robert browning works Comparison of "my last duchess" and "Porphyria's Lover"

Porphyria's Lover

Browning's forte and his principal formal strategy in this early poem is a monologue through which an unaware speaker reveals character disorders. It is the speaker's diction and syntax as he reports his perceptions and inferences that reveal his moral character. The first four lines are simple, flat, four-measure statements, end-stopped and regular in meter until the spondee of line 5, “heart fit.” After the speaker's personification of the wind, which suggests his own helplessness and suppressed emotions, the ambiguous grammar of the emphatic spondee suggests both a heart ready to break and a heart that is having a fit. Lines 6-15, which describe Porphyria's movements, are correspondingly more fluid, with enjambment and midline clause breaks.

The effect is a contrast between Porphyria's action and the speaker's unmoving passivity. Lines 15-30 show the speaker overcome by Porphyria's presence. He has lost even the weak “I” of line 5 and has become so dissociated from himself that he reports his inability to reply to Porphyria's call as “no voice” being heard, as though he is outside himself listening.

The word “displaced” (line 18) suggests the displacement of the speaker's center of being, a kind of moral paralysis. This self-alienation continues with the speaker's sense that Porphyria is the one who moves his arm and head. The word “stooping” (line 19) is, again, grammatically ambiguous, this time as a dangling modifier, since the speaker, not Porphyria, is the one who must bend over to reach her shoulder (line 31 shows that he is the one who must look upward). Lines 22-25 seem to indicate the speaker's judgment more than Porphyria's “murmuring,” as they continue his merging, or confusing, of their identities (John, 380).

Still seeing himself ...