Kukathas is a freelance writer and editor. In this essay, Kukathas considers to what extent the reader should believe the mad speaker's account of events in Browning's poem.

Many readers agree that "Porphyria's Lover," is a poem in which a madman recounts to himself the events of the night before that end with his murdering the woman he loves. The speaker's actions and words—his strangling of his victim with her own hair and his insistence afterwards that she is glad at what has happened—surely point to his tenuous grip on reality. However, if the narrator in "Porphyria's Lover" is in fact insane, certain difficulties arise. Since his is the only account offered of what happens that stormy night, it seems that the reader gets only his version of events and then must try to figure out from his view how to assess the situation. But...