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In 1833 Browning's first published poem, the lyrical, confessional form of Pauline looks back to the dominant mode of the Romantic poets rather than forward to his mid-Victorian acheivement. In Paracelsus he abandoned the confessional mode and put many of the same thoughts and feelings into dramatic form. Therefore from now on his poems would be "dramatic in principle-. Two poems that Browning published soon after are even more fully dramatic. These poems Johannes Agricola and Porphyria's Lover, are objective studies in morbid psychology. In Porphyria's Lover the world is restricted to a single point of view, to the words of the character who is speaking. This is the source of much of the richness and power of the dramatic monologue. We soon deduce even without the 1842 title Madhouse Cells that the speaker in the poem is insane. He reveals himself as a murderer, and a necrophiliac. He believes God's silence indicates that God condones his act.
"And yet God has said not a word!-.
Or is it that God has not yet spoken and the speaker fearfully awaits God's judgement. By giving us only the speaker's version of events, Browning creates a poem that is fundamentally ambivalent. We could say the man's madness extenuates his crime, or was there really a crime and if so, was it committed in such a way. He could just be imaging everything, or perhaps this happened in the past and his mind is trapped within the memory of that night. Once our imagination is engaged by these ambiguities, each line becomes an index to the complex human mind Browning has portrayed. For example, the opening lines tell us that it is the man, not the wind that is sullen and spiteful. Porphyia's Lover is technically a soliloquy as there is no listener to hear the speaker's words. In Browning's later works a listener is usually clearly indicated so that the poem becomes a one-end conversation that the reader is permitted to overhear.
