The three blank verse poems which complete the series of purely dramatic pieces, A Death in the Desert, Caliban upon Setebos and Mr. Sludge, "The Medium" are more elaborate than any yet named. They follow, to a considerable extent, the form of the blank verse monologues which are the glory of Men and Women. Alike in their qualities and defects they represent a further step in development. The next step will lead to the elaborate and extended monologues which comprise the greater part of Browning's later works.
A Death in the Desert is an argument in a dramatic frame-work. The situation imaged is that of the mysterious death of St. John in extreme old age. The background to the last utterance of the apostle is painted with marvellous brilliance and tenderness: every circumstance is conceived and represented in that pictorial style, in which a word is equal to a touch of the brush of a great painter. But, delicately as the circumstances and surroundings are indicated, it is as an argument that the poem is mainly left to exist. The bearing of this argument on contemporary theories may to some appear a merit, to others a blemish. To make the dying John refute Strauss or Renan, handling their propositions with admirable dialectical skill, is certainly, on the face of it, somewhat hazardous. But I can see no real incongruity in imputing to the seer of Patmos a prophetic insight into the future, no real inconsequence in imagining the opponent of Cerinthus spending his last breath in the defence of Christian truth against a foreseen scepticism. In style, the poem a little recalls Cleon; with less of harmonious grace and clear classic outline, it possesses a certain stilled sweetness, a meditative tenderness, all its own, and certainly appropriate to the utterance of the "beloved disciple."
Caliban upon Setebos; or, Natural Theology In the Island,[[37]] is more of a creation, and a much greater poem, than A Death in the Desert. It is sometimes forgotten that the grotesque has its own region in art. The region of the grotesque has been well defined, in connection with this poem, in a paper read by Mr. Cotter Morison before the Browning Society. "Its proper province," he writes, "would seem to be the exhibition of fanciful power by the artist; not beauty or truth in the literal sense at all, but inventive affluence of unreal yet absurdly comic forms, with just a flavour of the terrible added, to give a grim dignity, and save from the triviality of caricature."[[38]] With the exception of The Heretic's Tragedy, Caliban upon Setebos is probably the finest piece of grotesque art in the language. Browning's Caliban, unlike Shakespeare's, has no active part to play: if he has ever seen Stephano and Trinculo, he has forgotten it. He simply sprawls on the ground "now that the heat of day is best," and expounds for himself, for his own edification, his system of Natural Theology. I think Huxley has said that the poem is a truly scientific representation of the development of religious ideas in primitive man. It needed the subtlest of poets to apprehend and interpret the undeveloped ideas and sensations of a rudimentary and transitionally human creature like Caliban, to turn his dumb stirrings of quaint fancies into words, and to do all this without a discord. The finest poetical effect is in the close: it is indeed one of the finest effects, climaxes, surprises, in literature. Caliban has been venturing to talk rather disrespectfully of his God; believing himself overlooked, he has allowed himself to speak out his mind on religious questions. He chuckles to himself in safe self-complacency. All at once—
"What, what? A curtain o'er the world at once!
Crickets stop hissing; not a bird—or, yes,
There scuds His raven that hath told Him all!
It was fool's play, this prattling! Ha! The wind
Shoulders the pillared dust, death's house o' the move,
And fast invading fires begin! White blaze—
A tree's head snaps—and there, there, there, there, there,