Contradictions

Lines 30-42 of “Porphyria’s Lover” are very surprising and disturbing. The event described is not predictable given the tone of the rest of the poem. The speaker’s actions seem to contradict his feelings. The omission of the other character’s feelings gives the reader the impression that the speaker has a distorted view of what the other person is thinking or feeling. The contradiction ties in the opening scene of the poem. Lines 30-42 depict a very important event in the poem, and change the reader’s perception of the speaker.
Porphyria’s lover expresses how much he loves her, and how he kills her in lines 34-41. He discusses how he saw how much she loved him and how that “made” his “heart swell and still it grew.” He was happy that she loved him and described her as “mine, mine, fair, / Perfectly good and pure.” Although this description of Porphyria does not sound realistic, it does sound positive. A person can not be pure, unless one is describing the subject to be a virgin or innocent, and that would not make a person good. The speaker continues to say that he wound her hair around her neck “Three times her little throat around, / And strangled her.” The previous lines do not give the reader the sense that the speaker wanted to kill Porphyria. He even says that once he found out that she loved him so much he “debated what to do” and then he “found/A thing to do,” the thing being to strangle her. The action seemed to be a contradiction of his feelings. He felt love for her, to the extent that his “heart swelled,” but he killed her.
The contradiction the speaker expresses when shifting from loving Porphyria to killing her helps to tie in with another contradiction at the beginning of the poem. The speaker describes a storm, and in the first two lines it sounds like a relatively normal scene; “The rain set early in to-night, / The sullen wind was soon awake.” The next two lines personify the storm to make it sound malicious; “It tore the elm-tops down for spite, / And did its worst to vex the lake.” Porphyria herself is sort of a contradiction, for she comes in from the storm, with “damp hair” and “soiled gloves” yet she “shut out the cold and the storm.” Contradictions are an important aspect of this poem.
Porphyria’s thoughts and feelings are omitted from the text. The speaker says that he saw how she was “happy and proud” through her eyes. Yet still, he had no other affirmation of that feeling. After he strangles Porphyria, he describes how “no paint felt she;/ I am quite sure she felt no pain.” The fact that he has no idea how she felt gives the impression that she either did not struggle, which is awfully unlikely, or that the speaker was not paying attention to her. Porphyria is not given any dialogue during the poem, and her feelings are not expressed by the narrator, which gives the impression that neither the reader, nor the speaker can know what she is thinking.