In both Porphyria’s Lover and My Last Duchess, Robert Browning portrays destructively possessive male roles, as well as violence and passion.  In her book Robert Browning, Isobel Armstrong states that Browning wanted to portray a “sophisticated analysis” of insanity by describing these men and their need to entirely possess their significant others (265).  Browning was born in London in 1812 to “fairly liberal” parents who were involved in his “education” and “personal growth” (Cocola 1).  He attended college at London University but did not complete his education there (Armstrong xvi).  He was married in secret to Elizabeth Barrett in 1846 and stayed with her till her death in 1861 (Armstrong xix).  He and Elizabeth had one child in 1849 that they named Robert Wiedmann Barrett.  Robert Browning died in 1889 and was buried in Westminster Abbey but not before writing many good pieces of poetry and innovating both the ideals of the Victorian Age and poetry itself (Abram 1347). 

One of Browning’s poetic masterpieces is the poem Porphyria’s Lover. It has been called “the most shocking of Browning’s dramatic monologues” (Cocola 2).  The poem is set in an iambic pentameter format, which indicates an ABABB rhyming pattern, and the “intensity and asymmetry” of the poem mirror the subject of this work (Cocola 2).  According to the Norton Anthology of English Literature, the poem was originally published in a collection of monologues entitled, Madhouse Cells (1349).  Robert Browning changed the title of this poem from Madhouse Cells to Porphyria’s Lover because the former name implied insanity but also that the speakers were in an asylum (Armstrong 264).  This change of title is even more significant when one observes that Porphyria’s Lover seems to be an “unexpected refusal” to indicate the true content of the poem which is murder (Armstrong 254).  This “dramatic monologue” has captured the thoughts of the narrator after freshly strangling his love, Porphyria, which he does in order to possess her completely.  The narrator is recalling his murderous actions while sitting with Porphyria’s dead body.  The poem’s imagery follows closely with the Romantic poetry of the early eighteenth century and has been compared to Keats, Tennyson, Eliot, and even Shakespeare.