Porphyria's Lover

In “Porphyria’s Lover” the speaker is infatuated with Porphyria but is unaware of her complete feelings. I found this poem to have irony and a thick mysterious background. You get the sense that the two are happily in love the first part of the poem until the speaker seemingly goes crazy. He kills his precious Porphyria with her hair ribbon, “Three times her little throat around,” (40). Instead of loving her and being a couple, he chooses to kill her to have eternal love. “Porphyria’s love: she guessed not how” (56) the speaker says after she is dead, he was now sure that she loved him and didn’t want her love to falter. This is a strange poem and you don’t really understand how deranged the speaker is until you have a chance to let the poem sink in. I thought that this would end with a happy ending for the loving couple, but it ended in murder and the poor woman who seems to fall for the speaker should have kept any doubts she might have had. Her instincts were not good enough to keep her away from this crazy man!