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Updated: June 12, 2025
Next to these dramatic pieces come what we may be content to call simply poems: some lyrical, some narrative. The latter are straightforward enough, and, as a rule, full of spirit and humour; but this is more than can always be said of the lyrical pieces. Now, for the first time, in dealing with this first period, excluding 'Sordello, we strike difficulty. The Chinese puzzle comes in.
Browning's genuinely modest attitude towards it could not preclude the consciousness of the many imaginative beauties which its unpopular character had served to conceal; and he was glad to find, some years ago, that 'Sordello' was represented in a collection of descriptive passages which a friend of his was proposing to make.
How different the estimate of woman among the Pagan poets from that held by the Provençal poets! What a contrast to Juvenal is Sordello! The lady of a baronial hall deemed it an insult to be addressed in the language of gallantry, except in that vague and poetic sense in which every knight selected some lady as the object of his dutiful devotion.
This was one of the points on which he distinctly differed from his father. He took his dramatic subjects wherever he found them, and any historical research which they ultimately involved was undertaken for purposes of verification. 'Sordello' alone may have been conceived on a rather different plan, and I have no authority whatever for admitting that it was so.
The poet imagined as twenty years of age, who makes his fragment of a confession in Pauline, is more than a poet; he is rather of the Sordello type than of the type represented in Eglamor and Aprile.
We have a grander expression of the idea from Robert Browning, who relates how the vision of Sordello arises to consciousness: Upthrust, out-staggering on the world, Subsiding into shape, a darkness rears Its outline, kindles at the core . Is this to say that the poet's intuitions, apparently so sudden, have really been long germinating in the obscure depths of his mind?
The manuscript was with him in Italy during his visit of 1838; but the work was not to be hastily completed. Sordello was published in 1840, five years after Paracelsus.
Sordello now undertook to accompany the great Roman poet and his friend to a certain distance on their ascent towards the penal quarters of the mountain; but as evening was drawing nigh, and the ascent could not be made properly in the dark, he proposed that they should await the dawning of the next day in a recess that overlooked a flowery hollow.
It is true that though he now clearly sees the end, he has not perhaps recognised the means. If Sordello contemplated political action as his mode of effecting that minute's work, he must soon have discovered, were his life prolonged, that not thus can a poet live in his highest faculty, or render his worthiest service.
I learned my own deep error: love's undoing Taught me the worth of love in man's estate, And what proportion love should hold with power In his right constitution; love preceding Power, and with much power always much more love." This was to be notably the method of 'Sordello, which appeared in 1840.
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