Both Edgar Allen Poe's poem “For Annie” and Robert Browning's poem “Porphyrias Lover” create complex relationships between sex and death . In “For Annie” the masochistic narrator sees sexual arousal as a suffering to be endured and embraces the resulting state as an appraisal of death. He is a masochist, who enjoys imagining himself dead and resolves his sexual concerns by visualizing a situation in which he is immobile and motionless, while his lover takes on a maternal role. In Robert Browning's “Porphyrias Lover,” however, the speaker is cruel and solves his problems by killing his lover and rationalizing his actions in terms of an imagined post-sexual state. Both speakers believe themselves to be honorable figures and victims of their own desires, but both reveal in their diction and imagery the true sexual nature of their problems. Furthermore, in both poems, death becomes a metaphor for satisfaction, whether imposed on another or a state achieved for oneself. The opening lines of "Porphyria's Lover" create a tone of sadness and violence that is seen throughout the rest of the poem. There is the personification of the wind, seen as a destructive human force, aggravated by the same “spite” that the speaker will reveal in the killing of his lover. Porphyria's entry in the sixth line begins a ten-line sentence that ends with the minute she calls the speaker. The last word he says in the sentence is "I"; the speaker insists that he himself is the goal towards which he is moving, and remains the epitome of his focus in the stages leading to his murder. Porphyria pays a lot of attention to her lover, trying to appease him in a way that suggests that perhaps she is... middle of paper... is unimportant and insubstantial. Both Browning and Poe share a common attraction to sex. and death, and both poets take on the task of those who speak in each of their poems to discover their own sexual feelings and inadequacies. For Browning, the feeling of being undervalued and weak is revealed in a fantasy in which he kills his lover. Only after she is dead and immobile will he be able to declare himself sexually and instigate any intimate contact. On the other hand, Poe finds sex painful and torturous, a horrible necessity to endure in order to arrive at the passionless state that follows. For Poe, the sexual act frees him from the role of an adult male, allowing him to become a child again and withdraw from the world. Celebrate in the meekness of having been found, lying still and helpless, overcome with a masochistic joy that needs others to see.
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