Poetry Comparison Thesis: "Porphyria's Lover" and "Skunk Hour"

At first glance, Robert Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover” and Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour” seem to share little in common in terms of style and form. However, Browning and Lowell both use a linguistic shift halfway through the poem to reveal the speaker’s insanity. In line 31 of “Porphyria’s Lover,” Browning shifts the active agent from Porphyria to the speaker, who subsequently commits an act of violence that exposes his insanity. Similarly in “Skunk Hour,” Lowell uses a shift from present tense to the past tense in stanza 4 to indicate a moment of introspection, during which the speaker realizes he is insane. A comparison based on the effect of the shifts reveals that, though the specific style and form of “Porphyria’s Lover” and “Skunk Hour” are distinct, in both poems they serve the function of characterizing the speaker and establishing mood.