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Like the poet of Pauline, after his immersion in worldliness, Sordello again seeks solitude, and recovers a portion of his higher self; but solitude cannot content one who is unable to obtain the self-manifestation which his nature demands without the aid of others who may furnish an external body for the forces that lie suppressed within him.
The fame as a singer which comes suddenly to him draws Sordello out of his Goito solitude to the worldly society of Mantua, and his experiences of disillusion and half voluntary self-degradation are those which had been faintly shadowed forth in Pauline, and exhibited more fully and yet with a difference in the Basil experiences of Paracelsus.
Browning seems to have recognized fleeting glimpses of Shelley in Sordello, and to have acknowledged them in his apostrophe to Shelley at the beginning of that poem. Browning's revulsion of feeling, after he discovered Shelley's abandonment of Harriet, did not prevent him from holding to his early ideal of Shelley as the typical poet.
For his subject 'He singled out Sordello compassed murkily about With ravage of six long sad hundred years.
He described Sordello as a vast mural fresco, a Puvis de Chavannes in tone, a symphonic drama wherein agonized the shadowy Æschylean protagonist.
The same idea is one of the leading motives in Sordello. One seems to be coming perilously near the decadent poet's argument again. It is plain, at any rate, how the abandon of the decadent might develop from the poet's insistence upon his need to follow impulse utterly, to develop himself in all directions. The cry of Browning's poet in Pauline,
Some of his most eloquent and wonderful passages have no grammar whatever. In Sordello grammar does not exist; and the want of it, the strain upon the mind caused by an effort to make coherent sentences out of a fleeting, ever-changing, iridescent maze of talk, wearies and exasperates the reader.
Here we may rightly disregard the order of publication, and postpone the record of external incidents in Browning's poetical development, in order to place Sordello in its true position, side by side with Paracelsus.
Browning's fancy, since he studied no less than thirty works upon it, which were to contribute little more to his dramatic picture than what he calls 'decoration', or 'background'. But the one guide which he has given us to the reading of the poem is his assertion that its historical circumstance is only to be regarded as background; and the extent to which he identified himself with the figure of Sordello has been proved by his continued belief that its prominence was throughout maintained.
His American friend tells at length the story of a search in the Church of San Niccolò for the tomb of the chieftain Salinguerra of Browning's own Sordello. At times he entered the bric-a-brac shops, and made a purchase of some piece of old furniture or tapestry.
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