It has, for those who are not repelled, a charm all its own. I know of no other poem in the language which is at once so wearisome and so seductive. How can one explain paradoxes? There is a charm, or there is none: that is what it amounts to, for each individual. `Tutti ga i so gusti, e mi go i mii' — "everybody follows his taste, and I follow mine," as the Venetian saying, quoted by Browning at the head of his Rawdon Brown sonnet, has it.
All that need be known concerning the framework of "Sordello", and of the real Sordello himself, will be found in the various Browning hand-books, in Mr. Nettleship's and other dissertations, and, particularly, in Mrs. Dall's most circumspect and able historical essay. It is sufficient here to say that while the Sordello and Palma of the poet are traceable in the Cunizza and the strange comet-like Sordello of the Italian and Provencal Chronicles (who has his secure immortality, by Dante set forth in leonine guise — `a guisa di leon quando si posa' — in the "Purgatorio"), both these are the most shadowy of prototypes. The Sordello of Browning is a typical poetic soul: the narrative of the incidents in the development of this soul is adapted to the historical setting furnished by the aforesaid Chronicles. Sordello is a far more profound study than Aprile in "Paracelsus", in whom, however, he is obviously foreshadowed. The radical flaw in his nature is that indicated by Goethe of Heine, that "he had no heart." The poem is the narrative of his transcendent aspirations, and more or less futile accomplishment.
It would be vain to attempt here any adequate excerption of lines of singular beauty. Readers familiar with the poem will recall passage after passage — among which there is probably none more widely known than the grandiose sunset lines: —
"That autumn eve was stilled:
A last remains of sunset dimly burned
O'er the far forests, — like a torch-flame turned
By the wind back upon its bearer's hand
In one long flare of crimson; as a brand,
The woods beneath lay black." . . .
What haunting lines there are, every here and there — such as those of Palma, with her golden hair like spilt sunbeams, or those on Elys, with her
"Few fine locks
Coloured like honey oozed from topmost rocks
Sun-blanched the livelong summer," . . .
or these,
"Day by day
New pollen on the lily-petal grows,
And still more labyrinthine buds the rose ——"
or, once more,
"A touch divine —
And the sealed eyeball owns the mystic rod;
Visibly through his garden walketh God ——"