Comparing My Last Duchess 'And Porphyria's Lover'

Robert Browning was considered one of the greatest poets of the nineteenth century and is one of the major poets of the Victorian era. His major poems showed his mastery of the dramatic monologue, a poem written in the form of a speech by an individual character that reveals the character’s inner feelings and thoughts. According to John Algeo, Professor of English at the University of Georgia, “When discussing the poetic form of dramatic monologue, it is rare that it is not associated with its usage attributed to the poet Robert Browning.” This clearly suggests that most of Browning’s poems will be in the form of dramatic monologues. The poems My Last Duchess and Porphyria’s Lover by Robert Browning have many similarities as well as differences.

However, the women die in very different ways. In My Last Duchess, the Duke either metaphorically or literally kills the Duchess. This is implied in lines 45-46, which explain, “This grew; I gave commands/Then all smiles stopped together.” There are two ways to interpret these lines; either the Duke gave commands to her to stop smiling, or he gave commands for her to be killed. Either way, it cannot be argued that he was the cause of her death due to his phenomenal envy. To emphasize, George Monteiro, Professor of English at Brown University, points out that, “...the speaker committed a vengeful crime out of jealousy.” Similarly, in Porphyria’s Lover, the speaker is the solitary cause of his lover’s demise. He reveals this by describing that, “...all her hair/In one long yellow string I wound/Three times her little throat around/And strangled her.” (lines 39-41). This speaker’s motives are out of love rather than hatred. However, as Professor of Philosophy Aaron Ben-Zeev articulates, “Explaining the man’s horrific behavior as stemming from love is in no way a justification for their actions.” Just because the speaker’s motives in Porphyria’s Lover were not due to anger does not mean he can be seen as any better than the Duke. Undoubtedly, the speakers in both poems were responsible for the death of their