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As the reader learns at the poem’s end, the speaker is speaking in the immediate aftermath of the very events he’s recounting. That is to say, he tells the story of how he came to murder Porphyria while sitting by the warm fireside with her dead body propped up beside him. This retrospective narrative structure is deeply sinister. For one thing, it’s only at the end that we readers come to realize that we’ve been sitting with the speaker and his dead lover all along. This realization has the implicit effect of making us complicit in the speaker’s crime; we become accessories after the fact. Other than the speaker and us, no one else knows of the murder that has just taken place. Furthermore, since the speaker isn’t narrating the murder as it happens, he has the opportunity to depict the events as he sees fit. Not only can he give his story the clichéd Romantic frame of a dark and stormy night, but since he’s no longer in the thrall of his passion, the speaker can also describe the events as though they unfolded with a perfectly rational logic.

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