Eternal Love
Robert Brownings Porphyrias Lover and Helen Adams I Love My Love, share a common subject: eternal and inescapable love. In each poem, the fated love remains even after death. These deaths both occur when the woman is strangled with her own hair by her lover.
I Love My Love told in the third-person point of view, is about a man and a woman who fall in love and get married. The man, however, tries to escape from the controlling love of his wife by strangling her with her own hair and burying her in the ground. Her hair comes to life and wreaks revenge by killing him so he cannot escape her eternal love.
Porphyrias Lover is also a poem about eternal love but is told in the first-person point of view. The love in this poem is between the speaker and his lover, Porphyria. When the speaker realized that Porphyria worships him, he kills her so that they can remain in that moment forever and so that their love will never die.
Both poems have a definite rhyme scheme and use imagery to emphasize the eternal love between the lovers. Also, the poems are near the same length and the murder in each occurs relatively in the middle of the poem. Both poems place emphasis on the hair of the woman. I Love My Love mentions golden stands and Porphyrias Lover repeats yellow hair several times. This may be a type of hubris, as a womans hair is often a symbol of her pride. In these poems, the womens hair leads to her death, although there is more emphasis on the dooming and tormenting hair in I Love My Love.
In her poem, Helen Adams uses repetition and colorful imagery to express the feelings between the lovers as well as in describing the woman. The repetition of the I love my love . . . line emphasizes the obsessive and controlling feelings that the woman has for her lover, as well as the repetition of the 4th line of almost every stanza that is repeated at the end of the same stanza. Also, the repetition of the same verbs in one stanza emphasizes the action taking place. For example, in stanza 5, the verbs dug, strangled, and buried are each used twice, emphasizing the actions of the murder.
Adams uses effective imagery to describe the physical attributes of the woman and her hair. The woman repeatedly combs her hair with a golden comb and traps her husband with gold bonds. Her hair is described as devilish and compared to a dazzling storm and a golden monster. She is presented as a sorceress shackling her lover, keeping him in bonds of gold which he cannot escape, and laughing at his attempts to escape her love. Her hair has a voice which torments him while he is running from her.
Browning uses images of nature to set the tone of his poem. The poem begins with rain and sullen wind, with Porphyria coming to him out of the storm, symbolizing the hope the speaker sees in her amidst the stormy world around him. The speakers emotions are revealed through his actions, as is distant from his lover when he thinks that she does not truly love him. Then when he realizes that she does truly love him, he strangles her to keep her with him, loving him, eternally. Unlike the woman in I Love My Love, Porphyria is apparently happy this way, and even wanted her life to end this way, as the speaker says, The Smiling rosy little head,/ So glad it has its utmost will, implying that Porphyria is not only happy with his action but wanted him to kill her. This becomes even more apparent in the line Her darling one wish would be heard. This creates an eerie tone in the poem as the reader wonders what the intentions of the lovers were before the murder.
I Love My Love and Porphyrias Lover share the same theme but seem to have separate and different tones. The tone of I Love My Love seems to be one of desperation and entrapment, revealing the inescapable aspect of love. Porphyrias Lover, however, presents a tone of eerie happiness and contentment of the inescapable aspect of love.
Tonia Jordan is an author on http://www.Writing.Com/ which is a site for Poetry.
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