Wham! Line/Poetry

• "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.