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  • Essay / Love and Its Corruption: Never The Time and The Place, Porphyria's Lover and Andrea Del Sarto

    In Porphyria's Lover and Andrea Del Sarto, Robert Browning explores notions of love and its ability to corrupt character and potential of an individual through its characteristic diegetic form; the dramatic monologue. Although the form of both of these poems is based on an implied audience, the primary agent and primary subject is the narrator, rather than the subjects he speaks about. The form itself requires the reader to complete the dramatic scene from within, drawing on inference and imagination, using the clues provided by Browning's narrators regarding their obsessions and preoccupations. In a different way, Never the Time and the Place varies in its metrical poetic structure and consists of both iambs and anapaests, combined by Browning with varying indentations and the use of enjambment to create a impression of the present environment as being a space of otherness. .Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay Along with the aforementioned otherness, Never the Time and the Place establishes the concept of the intransitory nature of love and its spatio-temporal limitations on the narrator, and does so in the title (and first line of the poem) itself. The negative adverb of time "never", when used as the first word of the poem, highlights the narrator's frustration with the nature of his love that needs to be explored. The eexegetic conjunction "and" is used by Browning to evoke the inseparable nature of space and time, reinforcing the totality of which the two are impossible to experience in tandem, and the final anapestic foot "and place" rushes rhythmically , indicating desire. of the narrator to speak of the “place” in question. After it turns out to be a house in which he lives with his lover in the liminal spatiality of the dream, this rush illuminates the narrator's fixation on experiencing the pleasures of a love that is forbidden to him in waking consciousness. The paratactic caesuras used by Browning after "This Path" and "This May" suggest the narrator's inherent hesitation to divulge the details of the dream, due to his awareness of its fleeting nature and inevitable conclusion, forcing him to return to the reality of the dream. life without her lover. Once the narrator enters the dream world, Browning describes the environment in such a way as to portray it as a force conspiring against the lovers. Pejorative descriptions of "rain" and "wind" as "hostile" and "malicious", portray the natural environment as a malignant and malevolent entity, offering an existential perspective of the universe itself preventing the love that he wishes to achieve to be achieved. realized in reality. A similar disruption of cosmic harmony is used by Browning in Porphyria's Lover with the "sullen wind" that "rips away the tops of the elms" and "thwarts the lake", a personification of the environment as a destructive force. Similar destructive traits are noted in Porphyria herself, however, with incendiary images of "flames" and "heat" indicating the narrator's perception of the damage caused by her lover. Unlike the artificial universe of Never Time and Place, Porphyria Lover's narrative documents a unique barrier to love that is equally insurmountable; the narrator's jealousy. The title of the poem itself outlines this concept with the use of the apostrophe of possession and is reiterated throughout the piece. Combined with the preponderance of the first person pronouns "me" and "my", Porphyria's strong demand to "give herself to me forever" is used by..