Robert Browning

The twist at the end of Robert Bowning's poem "My Last Duchess" is very ironic.  The speaker is speaking of his late wife, whom the reader assumes he has murdered, to his bride-to-be's father.  It does not seem like something anyone of a sound mind would even consider doing.  The speaker, though, does think highly of himself and his "nine-hundred-years-old name" (line 33) so he probably does not see himself as really having done anything wrong.  Similarly, the speaker in Browning's "Porphyria's Lover" also feels no remorse for murdering his lover.  The speakers of both poems also treat their actions as something of little importance.  While the speaker in "My Last Duchess" moves right on to the next piece in his art collection after explaining his late wife's portrait without missing a single beat, the speaker in "Porphyria's Lover" merely props "her head up as before,/Only this time my shoulder bore/Her head, which droops upon it still" (lines 49-51).  

Perhaps neither speaker feels they have wronged their victims because they believe they have been betrayed by the victims.  In "Porphyria's Lover" Porphyria only comes during the storm; it appears that for some reason their relationship must be kept secret.  But as soon as Porphyria reveals that she worships the speaker and he feels that in "That moment she was [his], [his], fair,/Perfectly pure and good" (lines 36-37), he exercises his power over her in order to ensure that "all night long [they will] not [stir]" (line 59).  The duchess, however, has given her husband reason to believe that "she ranked/[the speaker's] gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name/With anybody's gift" (lines 32-34), thus highly insulting him.  

This common thread of love and cold-blooded murder in these Browning poems make them both extremely intriguing and has given them both a timeless quality which has allowed them to be read for hundreds of years so far and conceivably an even longer time on into the future.