These two poems all use dramatic monologue. Monologue is a lengthy speech by a single person. The speaker unintentionally reveals his/ her true personality. The speaker’s utterance is conditioned by the situation and is usually directed to a silent audience.

In “Porphyria’s Lover”, there are a man and a woman, Porphyria; they have emotional entanglement. At first, the man pursues Porphyria but she refuses him. After that, Porphyria asks him to love her. However, his heart was broken. He doesn’t accept her love but he goes into raptures at the news. Then he debated what to do. It doesn’t mean how to reply Porphyria’s love; it means he considers that kills or not to kill Porphyria. We can realize foreshadowing in line eighteen and twenty, yellow hair. He uses Porphyria’s yellow hair to strangle her. He thinks only in this way that Porphyria belongs to him forever. The man who kills Porphyria is self-centered and egoistical. He is metamorphic possessive because he kills Porphyria to own her forever.

The end of this poem--- “And yet God has not said a word!” How could we explain this sentence? In Victorian Age, there is conflict between science and religion so this sentence might have three explanations: 1God acquiesce in his behavior. 2God is indifferent to human of fairs. 3In fact, there is no God.

In “My Last Duchess”, the duke introduces the painting to a person. He shows how he loves the woman who had already dead. However, when he mentions “The depth and passion of its earnest glance”, he starts to speak in a tone of gladness. The duke thinks that the duchess’s happy expression doesn’t only give her husband. Most importantly, she is easy to be pleased and she treats all men alike: 1”My favor her breast”; 2”The dropping of the daylight in the west”; 3”The bough of carries some officious fool broke in the orchard for her”; 4”The white mule”. Therefore, the duke killed his wife after he let painter painted his wife. Then we know the guest is a servant of the count. The duke is going to marry the daughter of the count.

The duke is proud of his background and arrogant because of “My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name”. He is dominant; he couldn’t accept that his wife doesn’t esteem him to be the most important person in her life. He is snobbish, self-centered, and egoistic person. He is inhuman and evil due to the fact that he killed his wife. The duke, a jealous man, hates his wife notice other persons or things. He is also greedy owing to the fact that he ask dowry. He has some collections. One is paintings and statures; the other is wife because he wants to marry the second wife.

The duchess is easygoing woman who isn’t snobbish. She treats anything the same. The duchess is a woman who with the vitality and power of life. She really enjoys nature of life that she isn’t luxury, not corruption of the upper-class.

In these tow poems, Robert Browning used dramatic monologue to represent the speaker’s abnormal state of mind.