Porphyria's Lover
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40 free Porphyria's Lover trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Robert Browning's 'Porphyria's Lover' takes barely a minute to read and is hard to forget. A man waits alone on a stormy night, the woman he loves arrives to comfort him, and by the last line he has killed her and is calmly explaining why. First published in 1836, it is now one of the most studied poems in English classrooms. This quiz covers the whole poem: what happens in the room and in what order, the details students are asked to quote, the speaker's twisted reasoning, and the technical side, from rhyme and metre to the terms critics use for a speaker like this one. It also covers how the poem was published and retitled, the works it is usually compared with, and the life of the poet who wrote it. It is pitched for GCSE, A-level and college literature students revising the poem, and for anyone who likes Victorian verse with a dark streak. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches something.
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Q 01What does the speaker of 'Porphyria's Lover' wind three times around Porphyria's throat to kill her?
Her own hair
Her own hair becomes the weapon: he gathers it into one long yellow string and strangles her just when he feels surest of her love.
Q 02In the final line of 'Porphyria's Lover', who does the speaker note has stayed silent all night?
God
God has not said a word, the killer remarks, and readers still argue whether he takes that silence as approval or is uneasily waiting to be punished.
Q 03What weather sets in early on the night of 'Porphyria's Lover', before Porphyria arrives?
Rain
Rain sets in early that evening, yet she comes anyway; the speaker treats her soaked arrival as proof of how badly she wants to be with him.
Q 04Which famous children's poem first appeared in the same 1842 collection as 'Porphyria's Lover'?
The Pied Piper of Hamelin
The Pied Piper of Hamelin shared the 1842 volume with the murder poem, so Browning's rat-catcher and his killer came out side by side.
Q 05According to most readings of 'Porphyria's Lover', what is the speaker trying to do by killing Porphyria?
Preserve a perfect moment
Preserve a perfect moment: he wants to stop time at one flawless instant of the evening, so he kills her and arranges her body as though she were still alive.
Q 06Which fellow poet did Robert Browning secretly marry in 1846, ten years after publishing 'Porphyria's Lover'?
Elizabeth Barrett
Elizabeth Barrett married him in secret because her domineering father forbade any of his children to wed, and he disinherited her for it.
Q 07In 'Porphyria's Lover', what does the speaker twice insist that Porphyria never felt as she died?
Pain
Pain is what he rules out, twice over, as if persuading himself; critics read the repetition as a sign of how deluded he is.
Q 08Which poetic form, also used in Tennyson's 'Ulysses', is 'Porphyria's Lover' most often classed as?
Dramatic monologue
Dramatic monologue is the label: one character, plainly not the poet, does all the talking and gives away far more about himself than he intends.
Q 09After shutting out the storm in 'Porphyria's Lover', what does Porphyria kneel down to do?
Stoke the fire
Stoke the fire: she makes the cheerless grate blaze before taking off her own soaked clothes, a job the speaker had not stirred himself to do.
Q 10In 'Porphyria's Lover', what kind of dwelling does Porphyria enter to find the speaker alone in the cold?
A cottage
A cottage is the meeting place, and one reading takes that as a hint that the lovers cannot be seen together openly or in society.
Q 11What colour are the eyes that the speaker of 'Porphyria's Lover' opens again after killing Porphyria?
Blue
Blue eyes that still seem to laugh are what he claims to see, which critics treat as his own hallucination and not a sign of life.
Q 12Which five-line rhyme pattern does Robert Browning repeat from start to finish in 'Porphyria's Lover'?
ABABB
ABABB runs through all sixty lines, and the repeated closing rhyme brings each group of five to a heavy rest.
Q 13Which soiled item does Porphyria lay aside after coming in from the storm in 'Porphyria's Lover'?
Her gloves
Her gloves are the stained detail; some critics set them against the speaker's later claim that her eyes, open in death, are without a stain.
Q 21Which Unitarian-founded British periodical first printed 'Porphyria's Lover' in its January 1836 issue?
Monthly Repository
Monthly Repository ran the poem under a one-word title, the victim's name alone; the word 'Lover' was only added in later collected editions.
Q 22Which metre, one foot shorter than Shakespeare's usual line, does Robert Browning use for 'Porphyria's Lover'?
Iambic tetrameter
Iambic tetrameter, four beats to a line, never lets up, and some readers hear that unchanging rhythm as a sign of the speaker's disturbed mind.
Q 23Decades before Freud, 'Porphyria's Lover' became Robert Browning's first poem to explore which subject?
Abnormal psychology
Q 14In 'Porphyria's Lover', what kind of gathering has Porphyria left behind to visit the speaker that night?
A feast
A feast, and a merry one: she walks out on the party mid-evening, which the speaker takes as proof that her passion for him has won out.
Q 15How does the speaker of 'Porphyria's Lover' react when Porphyria settles next to him and calls him?
He says nothing
He says nothing, so Porphyria has to arrange his limp body against hers herself; critics wonder whether he will not respond or simply cannot.
Q 16As 'Porphyria's Lover' ends, hours after the murder, what is the speaker still doing?
Sitting with her
Sitting with her is all he does: the pair have not stirred all night, and he talks as though the scene could simply go on.
Q 17After the murder in 'Porphyria's Lover', where does the speaker prop up Porphyria's drooping head?
On his shoulder
On his shoulder, in a mirror image of the start, when she had drawn his cheek down onto hers; the two have swapped roles.
Q 18Which device is Robert Browning using when the wind in 'Porphyria's Lover' is called sullen and spiteful?
Personification
Personification gives the gale human moods, and critics see the speaker projecting his own helplessness onto the weather before Porphyria arrives.
Q 19In 'Porphyria's Lover', where does Porphyria place the speaker's unresisting arm as she embraces him?
Around her waist
Around her waist: she does the embracing for him, and the speaker reports it as if his arm were an object being moved by someone else.
Q 20Under which joint title did Robert Browning pair 'Porphyria's Lover' with 'Johannes Agricola in Meditation' in 1842?
Madhouse Cells
Madhouse Cells was the heading, a label that warned readers from the start not to trust either speaker's account of himself.
Abnormal psychology was new ground for him in 1836, and it became a habit: many of his later speakers are eccentrics, lunatics or people under strain.
Q 24Scholars who read the name in 'Porphyria's Lover' literally argue that Porphyria stands for what?
A disease
A disease is the claim: porphyria is also a rare blood disorder, so on this reading the speaker's killing of her marks his own recovery.
Q 25To which country did Robert Browning, author of 'Porphyria's Lover', move after his 1846 marriage?
Italy
Italy was home for fifteen years; the couple settled in Florence at Casa Guidi, and Browning later called the country his university.
Q 26In which London church is Robert Browning, author of 'Porphyria's Lover', buried beside Tennyson?
Westminster Abbey
Westminster Abbey holds him in Poets' Corner, although he died far from London at his son's home in December 1889.
Q 27Because 'Porphyria's Lover' names no listener, which stage term do some critics think fits it better?
Soliloquy
Soliloquy is the stricter word, since nobody in the poem hears him; Browning's later speakers usually give themselves away to a listener who is present.
Q 28Which Robert Browning poem of 1868–69, long after 'Porphyria's Lover', retells a murder trial through many voices?
The Ring and the Book
The Ring and the Book runs to more than twenty thousand lines and finally brought him the renown he had chased for nearly forty years.
Q 29Which Romantic poet did Robert Browning, author of 'Porphyria's Lover', imitate as a boy by turning vegetarian?
Percy Shelley
Percy Shelley so dazzled him that he asked for the rest of the poet's works for his thirteenth birthday and declared himself an atheist as well.
Q 30Which series of eight pamphlets by Robert Browning included 'Porphyria's Lover' in its third number in 1842?
Bells and Pomegranates
Bells and Pomegranates was meant to hold only his plays until his publisher, Moxon, persuaded him to add shorter poems already printed in periodicals.