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“Porphyria’s Lover” has a complex tone characterized at once by placid rationality and emotional disturbance. The poem’s speaker initially seems quite calm and in control. Although he opens the poem describing a violent storm, he does so in verses that are perfectly regular in both meter and rhyme, and which therefore convey a measured sensibility. This sensibility draws the reader in and inspires trust. When Porphyria arrives, however, subtle disturbances in the metrical regularity begin to trouble our trust in the speaker’s emotional state. Porphyria’s name doesn’t fit neatly into the poem’s iambic rhythm, so her very presence in the poem marks a disturbance. Furthermore, even as the speaker struggles—and mostly succeeds—in maintaining metrical regularity, the grammatical rhythm of his speech ceases to align neatly with the lines of the poem. Sentences begin and end in the middle of lines, and clauses spill over messily from one line to another. Amidst these disturbances, however, the speaker goes on to describe his grisly murder of Porphyria as if it were a perfectly rational “thing to do” (line 38). Though attempting to maintain a facade of rationality, the speaker inadvertently reveals the depths of his emotional disturbance.

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