Freezing a moment in time is a power no human being should have control over. However, the necessity of granting ourselves that supremacy is sometimes inevitable. This provokes a very controversial situation where actions are justified by their means. In the poem "Porphyria's Lover" by Robert Browning, we could clearly see how the narrator attempts to take control by giving himself the power to sustain, and paralyze a moment in time, due to its preciousness and wholesomeness.
"The rain set early in tonight, the sullen wind was soon awake, it tore the elm-tops down for spit- the poem starts by creating a setting of mystery and discomfort, which gives the innuendo that something bad will happen. Within the first lines of the poem we could tell that he is waiting for Porphyria at his place. He is uneasy and angry because she's still not there: "I listened with heart fit to break". Once she appears in the scene, everything is calm: "She shut the cold out and the storm, and kneeled and made the cheerless grate blaze up, and all the cottage warm." The way the narrator expresses himself once Porphyria enters the room, shows how enchanted he is by her presence.
" She sat down by my side and called me. When no voice replied, she put my arm about her waist" this line proves again that he is upset. His sophomoric way of reacting to her being late shows how dependent and childish he is. But it is she that makes him act in such a manner. It's she who provokes him and drives him to do the things he does. She teases him and even plays with his emotions: "She put my arm about her waist, and made her smooth white shoulder bare, and all her yellow hair displaced, and, stooping, made my cheek lie there." There is something sexual about the way Porphyria reveals her bare shoulder provoking the speaker in a more physical way, and maybe that is all Porphyria is looking to do.
In line 21 Porphyria murmurs how she loves him, but the lover feels she is not completely his at the moment.
