 Quotes •  Headscratchers •  Playing With • Useful Notes •  Analysis •  Image Links •  Haiku • Laconic
|
|---|
- "Porphyria's Lover" by Robert Browning starts off as a standard Victorian romantic poem about a man waiting in a cold, "cheerless" cottage for his lover Porphyria to arrive. She comes in out of the driving rain, kindles a fire, and pledges her love for the narrator. Then we get this:
 |
"...That moment she was mine, mine, fair,/Perfectly pure and good: I found/A thing to do,and all her hair/In one long yellow string I wound/Three times her little throat around,/And strangled her..." |
 |
- "And Richard Cory, one calm summer night, went home and put a bullet through his head."
- By the same poet (Edwin Arlington Robinson), we get the poem of Miniver Cheevey, who wishes he'd lived in the time of knightly chivalry. The last verse goes: Miniver Cheevey, born too late/Scratched his head and kept on thinking/Miniver coughed and called it fate/And kept on drinking.