The Relations Sex and Death in Poe’s “For Annie” and Browning’s “Porphyrias Lover”

Both Edgar Allen Poe’s poem “For Annie” and Robert Browning’s poem “Porphyrias Lover” create complex relations between sex and death. In “For Annie” the masochistic storyteller sees sexual excitement as a suffering to be endured and embraces the state that follows as an estimate to death. He is masochists, who takes pleasure in envisioning himself dead and resolves his own sexual worries by visualizing a situation in which he is motionless and immobile, while his lover takes on a maternal role. In Robert Browning’s “Porphyrias Lover,” on the other hand, the speaker is vicious, resolving his problems through murdering his lover and rationalizing his actions in terms of an imagined post-sexual state. Both speakers believe they are honorable figures and victims of their own desires, but both disclose in their diction and imagery the real sexual nature of their problems. In addition, In both poems, death becomes a metaphor for satisfaction whether forced on another or a state realized for oneself.

The opening lines of “Porphyria’s Lover” create a tone of gloominess and violence that is seen throughout the rest of the poem. There is personification of the wind, where it seen as a destructive human force, aggravated by the same “spite” that the speaker will reveal in his murder of his lover. Porphyria’s entrance into the sixth line begins a ten-line sentence that ends with the minute she calls on the speaker. The last word she says in the sentence is “me”; the speaker insists on the fact that he himself is the target to which she is moving, and he remains the epitome of her attention in the lines leading up to her murder. Porphyria pays close attention to her lover, attempting to appease him in a way that suggests she is possibly...

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...s unimportant and insubstantial.

Both Browning and Poe share a common attraction with sex and death, and both poets assume the task of the speakers of each of their poems to discover their own sexual feelings and inadequacies. For Browning, the feeling of being underrated and weak reveal itself in a fantasy in which he kills his lover. Only after she is dead and motionless can he declare himself sexually and instigate any intimate contact. On the other hand, Poe finds sex painful and torturous, a horrible necessity to be bear in 1order to arrive at the passionless state that follows. For Poe, the act of sex sets him free from the task of an adult male, permitting him to become a baby again and to withdraw from the world. He celebrates in the meekness that he was found, lying motionless and helpless, overwhelmed with a masochistic joy that he needs others to see.