Porphyria's Lover: Symbols

The Sullen Wind

The speaker opens the poem by describing a “sullen wind” that whipped up stormy conditions outside his cottage earlier in the evening (lines 1–5):

The rain set early in to-night,
   The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
   And did its worst to vex the lake:
  I listened with heart fit to break.

The violent force of the sullen wind foreshadows the speaker’s brutal passion. Just as this wind “was soon awake” and “tore the elm-tops down for spite,” so too will the speaker’s passion soon awaken and lead him to strangle Porphyria. But the wind doesn’t just foreshadow the speaker’s future violence; it also functions as a symbol for the speaker himself. The final line in the passage quoted above suggests as much. When the speaker declares, “I listened with heart fit to break,” he indicates that he’s in a gloomy mood, bad-tempered and sulking. As it turns out, this is precisely what it means to be sullen. The speaker is thus as sullen as the wind, and it’s this sullenness that defines his overall disposition at the beginning of the poem. In this regard, the speaker strongly resembles the trope of the Romantic hero, a gloomy figure who’s characterized by his melancholy, isolation, and refusal of social conventions. More than a foreshadowing device, the sullen wind directly symbolizes our speaker, who’s a twisted version of the Romantic hero.

The Cheerless Grate

When Porphyria enters the cottage, the first thing she does is build a fire in the “cheerless grate” (lines 6–9):

When glided in Porphyria; straight
She shut the cold out and the storm,
And kneeled and made the cheerless grate
Blaze up, and all the cottage warm

The word grate refers to the recessed part of a fireplace, which typically has a metal frame on which wood or coals can be burned. The particular grate referenced here is “cheerless” simply because it doesn’t have a fire. But on a symbolic level, the grate’s cheerlessness reflects the speaker’s cold and dark disposition as he sits alone in his chilly cottage on a stormy night. Significantly, it also reflects his lack of a constant female companion. In the Victorian era, women were strongly associated with the home, and hence with the chief emblem of domestic warmth: the hearth. Porphyria’s act of lighting a fire in the “cheerless grate” is thus symbolically loaded, since it brings a warm, feminine touch to the speaker’s otherwise cold, masculine cottage. It is precisely this domestic warmth the speaker wants to keep for himself, but which Porphyria cannot freely give over to him. By killing her, he aims to preserve the flame. And indeed, the poem ends with a sinister image of the speaker sitting with Porphyria’s corpse, presumably beside a roaring blaze.

God’s Silence

In the final lines of the poem, the speaker appeals to God’s silence as a sign of his innocence (lines 58–60):

And thus we sit together now,
And all night long we have not stirred,
And yet God has not said a word!

The speaker appears to be congratulating himself on literally getting away with murder. His implication seems to be that if “God has not said a word,” it’s because God understands the reasons behind the speaker’s actions and considers them just. However, it’s also possible to read the speaker’s reference to God’s silence in a different way. That is, if God hasn’t said a word about Porphyria’s death, it might be because there is no God. This reading reflects the significant wave of secularization that swept through the nineteenth century, establishing an increasingly secular public. Yet if there is no God, then the poem’s ending is that much more troubling, for it implies that humans are the only real moral authorities. And since the conventional morality of the time insisted that men should have control over women, Victorian society itself would seem implicitly to justify the speaker’s drive to possess and control Porphyria. With this interpretation in mind, it’s possible to argue that Browning strategically uses God’s silence in the poem to showcase the brutal absurdity of Victorian morality.

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