archive - don't read...uninteresting to anyone but me04:22 Dec 06 2006
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Re: Porphyria's Lover.
Posted: 20:49:01 - Dec 04 2006
Times viewed: 110
Joli
Porphyria: is derived from the Greek word πορφυρος, meaning purple. The related word porphyry is often used by poets to mean a very beautiful purple stone similar to marble. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, medical researchers identified a condition that is generally called Porphyria, a common manifestation of which is Acute Intermittent Porphyria: it is sometimes characterized by mental confusion, hallucinations, and extreme sensitivity to light.
Browning published the poem in 1836, at least 40 years before a doctor named the disease that Browning would simply have known as blood/liver disease.
Interpreting literature makes me as geekygiddy as a grad student because when a good author publishes (and Mr. Browning was no schlepp,) only half of the puzzle is done. It takes the reader to bring to the words new experience and imaginings to insure that the literature will live on.
I have my own ideas about this work, but Porphyria a vampire? Ok, sure...why not? It's as fun an interpretation as any other!
FOOT NOTES
Posted: 08:10:08 - Dec 05 2006
Times viewed: 86
VAMPARIAH
I never took Master's Degree in Literature, but I did take a level 600 class that I had to get clearance for.
Joli's interpretation is as valid as any and even more so. When the facts are examined, then the way to go about figuring out what authors intended in the works is done through a process known as EXPLICATION.
There is no one way to interpret a piece of writing. Any analysis must be supported however. Footnotes are never put on a piece of work until it is in its published form. So even then the interpretation of the poem is done by someone else than the author.
I have a collection with this poem in it, and I will go examine the footnotes.
If a case can be substantiated then the interpretation is freasible.
large written arguments (explications) are the process whereby a final interpretation of a work of literature is supported.
I do however have always not believed the experts. I think you can believe what ever you want to believe, or come away from the work with any different grain of understanding than anybody else, just in order for what you feel to be real about it, then the evidence has to point your way.
But it is not about who is right, or even supporting a case. If after reading the poem, you are sure about her purple hue, white skin, red hair, and lecherous tendencies, as well as seductive qualities, and this would lead you to think she was a modern day vampire, then the experts can go to rot. People's opinions about art/life are sacred.
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Re: Porphyria's Lover.
Posted: 08:47:59 - Dec 05 2006
Times viewed: 83
Murmuring how she loved me—she
Too weak, for all her heart's endeavour,
To set its struggling passion free
From pride, and vainer ties dissever,
And give herself to me for ever. 25
But passion sometimes would prevail,
Nor could to-night's gay feast restrain
A sudden thought of one so pale
For love of her, and all in vain:
I think these verses can give us some valuable clues:
The speaker finds her too weak to free her passion from what? Pride. And to do what? To “cut” vainer ties and give herself to him forever. He even says that is her heart’s endeavor. She just can't seem to pull it off! He further states that sometimes passion does prevail. So…there’s definitely some whoopee between them.
Her familiarity with this home and hearth so evident when she comes in and these verses suggest an affair. There is something about him or their union that makes her afraid to formally be his girl. Possibly he is of a lower class or she may already be married.
Further, I think HE is the pale one…look at the punctuation “one so pale for love of her, and all in vain.” He’s suffering for want of her, knowing she ain't gonna come through for him in the end. We know that SHE is rosy with laughing blue eyes.
I think he waits for that moment when passion and love are clearly in her eyes and makes the decision for both of them. He says, “that moment she was mine, mine, fair perfectly pure and good.” Later he states that there is no stain in her eyes. Since he knows she will not choose him, and will walk out the door again to go back to her vainer pursuits, he picks the moment of her clearest expression of affection for him and acts for them both.
No supernatural explanations are necessary…just an author with a pen and a love of seeing how far he can take Victorian romance.
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NORTON ANTHOLOGY NOTES
Posted: 13:45:54 - Dec 05 2006
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The notes I am working from come from a lectrure in 1985-1986 English Lit college coursework.
The professor asserts that it is about necrophilia, abnormal psychology, it is possible she is a married woman, he writes about himself in the third person, begs the question why did she not divorce? suggesting Schitzophrenia.
To analyze the poem and to come to our own conclusions we must understand the writer from his biographies. He was a very misunderstood writer and the earlier biographies did not address his real nature.
First off when he was 21 and he got his first poem published he did the classic mistake all young writers make, they write through the use of their own voice. When the critique of his poem came back he dropped the 3rd person and began to do research on other peoples misfortunes like the way a paparazzi might chance car crashes on the short wave.
He had found man's inhumanity to man, and he studied it fervently all his life. He renounced god early in life, in his teens, and then he came to the conclusion that life was but a test, and the presence of the perfection of heaven balanced the evil in this world.
Still however he felt the need to make this life a better place, which might have been part of the test.
He was nobody. He married Elizabeth Barrett Browning w3ho at the time was a semi-invalid, and through the power of his love of her, she was resurrected from an early death. He did outlive her 28 years, and didn't skip a beat.
Elizabeth Browning was his maker, obviously. She was the most heralded poet of her time at a time when all writer's even the female ones had to take male names to be read.
Obviously, Elizabeth's evil father had an impact on her, and she came to understand the evil in him and it's effects on her to the degree that she came face to face with loss of herself in the physical plane.
In order to take your demons to heart that they almost kill you, and then to be resurrected by love is probably why she did not have to take a male name, and people would listen to anyone with courage to live on in unfortunate forms.
She gave him a child, that is hows healthy she got from his love, and they lived in Italy for 16 years which the countryside of aids poetry.
Robert Broiwning used the device of the mask, to have other people speak his concerns and what social injustices, or interfamiliar injustices he wanted to get rid of.
I think Porphyria was indeed a vampire. I think Elizabeth Barrett Browning was one and the same. She had been the one to become semi-invalidic through the internalization of the demon to conquor the demon, and it almost killed her. Fortunately Robert Browning desired Immortality, otherwise he would have kept on writing in the first person, so he spent his life maintaining a woman who had turned to the occult to write so heavenly with the power of a forked tongue. Resurrecting her made him immortal. Whenst with the opposite gender, it may not be perfect love, and although his wishes for good health may have been only to achieve his immortality, when with the female a certain real love occurs, even if his motives were not pure.
Browning's battles between good and evil, of faith, of Immortal Love, his dive into the darkness and disturbed nature of life, made him an odd writer.
William Butler Yeats at his burial in Westminster Abbey (only the greatest get buried there) said:
"none of the odd ones have been so great and none of the great so odd."
He changed writing in his day, although he did make some compromise to get read. I am sure he came to love crippled Elizabeth, and because of that he was able to love her when she was resurrected, in a fashion as only immortal lovers can.
There have been movies made on the relationship between Elizabeth and Robert. One in recent times.
He was nothing, and her making him understanding the vampirism in her that made her the greatest poet of her time, brought him immortality as well.
The fact that this poem in my poetry anthology was the first listed, has some significance. It was a mask between her and him, in different forms.
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Re: Porphyria's Lover.
Posted: 18:17:52 - Dec 05 2006
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It's not written in third person, but first.
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Re: Porphyria's Lover.
Posted: 18:22:49 - Dec 05 2006
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And just for clarification...you believe Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a vampire and that Robert was her donor...that he sustained her, and she gave him immortality and basically taught him to be the writer he became? Please tell me if I understood that correctly, Vampariah.
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defending explications
Posted: 18:46:17 - Dec 05 2006
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Actually Joli you contradict yourself.
"Further, I think HE is the pale one…look at the punctuation “one so pale for love of her, and all in vain.” He’s suffering for want of her, knowing she ain't gonna come through for him in the end. We know that SHE is rosy with laughing blue eyes."
That is the full stanza in your words. If he is the pale one, that particular line the professor 20 years ago stressed that the "one so pale" was him, I have the notes in the column (line 28 was "himself in the 3rd person").
And now you also disagree or either ask me to support that he was her donor? Well he gave her life, if not blood, sometimes vampires only need attention to rise from the grave, but
Since my explication has been determined from the nature of their biographical evidence, that he resurrected her, and he had been the one to shift from writing in the 1st person to the 3rd person, and the mask device,
I really do support my explication that the writers and the lovers are the same. In life Joli I have found that the strangulation issue in the poem here, is this...
sometimes when you live with someone marriage becomes abysmal because of the lack of freedom and the stagnation of being happy, it dulls the senses. People must be hungry to achieve, and marriage sometimes has a teat full that the cup overfloweth with, and instead of bringing life, marriages sometimes kill people. I personally was keeping these ideas to myself, that their union is what killed her, it resuerrects on one hand and destroys on the other. I didn't not want people to be dissuaded from marrying each other, as we are all led to believe this is what life is about. I think however, that Robert knew, or realized that he was killing the one whom made him immortal, and he asks why did she not get a divorce? As the professor made me jot down in the margin last cenntury.
As you know Joli, there are subcategories of critics critiques offering various explications and interpretations of books and even poetry. I have thumbed through some of the genre, but I find those kinds of writers to be "stuffy" and if you want out of this argument on dotting eyes and crossing T's, I would be happy.
But I think you now see the validity, that since the word vampire, or the modern concept of it arose after the time this poem was written, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning had writing powers "some would consider unnatural", that these two personages were grappling with a most misunderstood thing at the time. This is why Hollywood has their microscope upon them throughout the decades.
The other thing that I let slide Joli, since you are exceptional for your right brain, and you primarily use the left for jurisprudence executive function and some details might get lost in your handle on everything, the Victorian age I believe, although I never studied the period, was a 50 year thing, and since Queen Victoria died in 1900, this poem was predating the Victorian Era, even though it was written in it's style because the manner in which he wrote it rang in a new age.
I am sure withstanding being corrected is one of your many talents, and you do not mind me correcting you for the benefit of others interpretations of history.
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Re: Porphyria's Lover.
Posted: 18:51:10 - Dec 05 2006
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"let slide" meant that I was considering correcting your statement before, but decided against it.
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Re: Porphyria's Lover.
Posted: 19:49:46 - Dec 05 2006
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I am such an idiot for responding to this and the sad thing is I know it, but here I am, doing it anyway. Please not that it is done in good humor and in the spirit of debate.
Vampariah,
I didn’t contradict myself…he writes in the first person. Look at all the pronouns; I’m not making this up. Yes, he refers to himself, but still…first person. Kinda like, “I wonder why this girl who generally knows better is still writing these words.”
Next, I neither agree nor disagree with you. I asked for clarification. I might suggest that he nursed or inspired her back to health could be another way of interpreting it. Yours may be fact…I have no way of knowing.
Next, please stop saying what I am and what I am not. For the purposes of the forum, I’m just somebody with an opinion. I know you’re often complimentary, but something about the way you stuff people quickly into categories is kinda creepy.
Last, the Victorian era is not air tight and if you want the point, ok, you got it…historians typically set it at 1837 to 1914. Porphyria dates in a year early at 1836. By all accountings, Browning is a Victorian writer, but ok. No need to let me slide.
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Re: Porphyria's Lover.
Posted: 22:19:07 - Dec 05 2006
Times viewed: 21
yes the male character is in the first person, but it is a device by Browning to voice elements of his own life. So even if it is in the first person, still it is him speaking through a mask.
The Victorian age began with the death of Queen Elizabeth's husband. Whatever year that was, I do not know.
You'd think creepy would be good on a dark site like this, or evil.
You are the one whom is studying both literature right now and the Victorian Age, I concede on both points.
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