Porphyria's Lover Mood Essay

The mood of just about anything can elicit an emotional response from the audience. In movies, things like the lighting or the kind of music heard can change the emotions or thought-process of its viewers and, much like films, literary works can create an atmosphere that makes the reader experience something; whether it be good or bad. That is the ability that many poems possess; the ability to create a mood which can make the audience actually feel the scene, not just read it. There is a lot to be said about that fact itself, but many popular poems also focus on creating a darker atmosphere that purposely makes the reader feel uncomfortable or leaves them questioning why the poem seems so ominous. Poems can convey the eerie and the disturbed, granted, each piece does so in their own way. Both Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning construct dark and haunting poems in The Lady of Shalott and Porphyria’s Lover, respectively. The two works cohesively build a mood that forces the reader to become enticed in the brooding tale that is told. Through the analysis of form, of imagery, and how the work affected its audience, both poems have become rooted deeply in the classical cannon, and are …show more content…
What makes it so compelling is that its form, when distilled, is very easy. A simple ABABB structure is carried throughout the entire poem. Its uniqueness is in the actual writing of the words. The speech is disjunct from the rhyming pattern. When analyzing the poem the writing seems to be much like a regular story being told, but when the rhyming is added in the flow becomes irregular, thus a sense of separation is created. The meter is Iambic Tetrameter throughout; the consistency of the meter causes abrasion with the writing. The speech does not want to be contained to 8 beats in each line, so to accommodate as such, the rhyming fits in illogically with the prose of the