Porphyria's Lover
A storm beats on a cottage until a woman lets herself in out of the wet, kindles the grate, and settles the head of a man who has not spoken a word against her shoulder. He tells the whole of it afterwards in a level voice, working out from her murmured confession of weakness that she worships him and that the moment is perfect. It appeared in a Unitarian monthly in 1836 as one of a pair headed Madhouse Cells, and is among the earliest poems in which Browning hands the whole of the speaking to a man he does not endorse.
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Attributes
Genre
Plot structure
Quest object (Greimas)
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
- 60% · 13 shared
- 57% · 12 shared
- 54% · 11 shared
- 54% · 10 shared
- 51% · 10 shared
- 49% · 11 shared