Voice in Robert Browning's Poetry Sara Manlowe College

Much of Robert Browning’s poetry establishes voice through his use of a narrator within the poem, as in the case of Porphyria’s Lover, and through use of dramatic monologue, such as in The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church and Fra Lippo Lippi. Langbaum defines dramatic monologue as being possessed of ‘a speaker other than the poet but also a listener, an occasion, and some interplay between speaker and listener.’ The fact that Browning uses clear internal narrators instead of simply writing as some poetic version of himself – if a poet can indeed write anyone who is not some poetic version of his or herself – gives him a degree of freedom to play with plots and ideas without necessarily claiming them as his own. By writing poetry in the first person, spoken by a made-up character, Browning makes the reader inhabit these characters’ minds and patterns of thought. In Porphyria’s Lover, the reader is forced into an uneasy understanding of the narrator who murders his lover, whereas the fact that The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church and Fra Lippo Lippi are written as dramatic monologues – which is to say, written as though they are spoken – lends them a vividness, a sense of both animation and...