Comparing Poems 'My Last Duchess And' Porphyria's Lover

Robert Browning is considered one of the great Victorian poets. He is also known for perfecting the dramatic dialogue. Robert Browning was also married to a poet named Elizabeth Browning. In their time, Elizabeth was actually the more famous of the two, which is odd when readers consider the circumstances of the era they lived in. Most of Robert Browning’s works are very disturbing. He uses these disturbing scenes to directly attack the male patriarchy back in his time. Browning’s two poems, My Last Duchess and Porphyria’s Lover, calls into question the idea of the treatment of women in the Victorian era. In both poems, My Last Duchess and Porphyria’s Lover, Robert Browning writes two similar tragic and disturbing stories. Both poems contain men who are mentally disturbed as well as two women they supposedly “love” but end up killing in the end. Probably the most important similarity between the two pieces of work is that they both deal with gender and they question the male patriarchy. Both of the women in the …show more content…
Porphyria’s Lover is probably the more disturbing of the two poems. Other than the fact that Porphyria’s lover strangles her to death with her own hair, there are even more disturbing concepts that are only realized when the poem is read more closely. At the beginning of the poem, Porphyria did everything when she walked in. She started the fire and put her lovers arm around her and laid his head on her bare shoulder. After her lover kills her, he then proceeds to put her head on his shoulder. “I propped her head up as before, only, this time my shoulder bore her head, which droops upon it still” (Porphyria’s Lover). One comes to a very horrific realization when it dawns on them what Browning is doing. He is telling of the man’s vision of how it should be when it comes to women. The man had to be above her, so much that he couldn’t even bare his head being below