Save here and there a scanty patch
Of primrose too faint to catch
A weary bee.
His next effort was the play Strafford (1837), which was written at the suggestion of the actor Macready, and was fairly successful. Sordello (1840) established Browning’s reputation for obscurity. The poem professes to tell the life-story of a Mantuan troubadour, but most of it is occupied with long irrelevant speeches and with Browning’s commentary thereon. Pippa Passes (1841) is in form a drama. In plot it is highly improbable, as it is based on several coincidences that all happen in one day. The work is rather more terse than its predecessors, and the purple patches are more numerous. Pippa’s songs, moreover, are often of great beauty. In Dramatic Lyrics (1842) there are many examples of clear and forcible work, including his Cavalier lyrics and such well-known pieces as Home Thoughts from Abroad. Other works of this period include The Return of the Druses (1843), a play; Dramatic Romances (1846), which shows the Browning obscurity and virility at their best and worst; Luria (1846), perhaps the weakest of his tragedies, resembling Othello in some respects; Men and Women (1855), consisting of dramatic monologues, some of great power and penetration; Dramatis Personæ (1864), containing more monologues; Balaustion’s Adventure (1871), a transcript from Euripides; and the longest of all his works, The Ring and the Book (1868–69), with which the period closes.
The Ring and the Book is (the word is so apt as to be inevitable) a literary “stunt.” It is the story of the murder of a young wife, Pompilia, by her worthless husband, in the year 1698, and the same story is told by nine different people, and continues for twelve books. The result is a monument of masterly discursiveness.
In the later stages of his career Browning’s mannerisms are accentuated in the dreary wildernesses of Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau (1871), Red Cotton Night-Cap Country (1873), The Inn Album (1875), and La Saisiaz (1878). It is difficult to understand the use of such poems, except to give employment to the Browning Societies that were springing up to explain them. But his better qualities are shown in Fifine at the Fair (1872), which is still too long; Dramatic Idylls (1879–80); Jocoseria (1883); Ferishtah’s Fancies (1884); and Parleyings with Certain People (1887). His long life’s work has a powerful close in Asolando (1889), which, along with much of the tired disillusion of the old man, has in places the firmness and enthusiasm of his prime. The last verses he ever wrote describe himself in the character he most loved to adopt:
One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,