Study guide
Sordello
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Overview
- Published
- March 1840 by Edward Moxon, London, at the expense of the poet's father; revised for the Poetical Works of 1863, the text given here
- Author
- Robert Browning (1812–1889), then twenty-seven, known for Paracelsus (1835) and the tragedy Strafford (1837)
- Genre
- A long narrative poem on a historical subject that is also a study of a poet's mind: part historical romance, part philosophical Bildungsroman (the story of a growth), with a talkative, digressive narrator
- Form
- Rhymed iambic pentameter couplets, heavily run-on, in six books of nearly 6,000 lines
- Setting
- North Italy in the 1220s, during the wars of Guelfs and Ghibellines: Verona, the castle of Goito near Mantua, Mantua, and besieged Ferrara; with a digression set in Venice in Browning's own day
- Main characters
- Sordello, a young poet; Palma, daughter of Ecelin da Romano; Taurello Salinguerra, the Ghibelline captain of Ferrara; Adelaide, Ecelin's wife; the minstrels Eglamor and Naddo
- Historical basis
- The Mantuan troubadour Sordello (fl. c. 1220–1269), honoured by Dante in Purgatorio VI–VIII; the houses of Romano and Este; Salinguerra Torelli of Ferrara; the emperor Frederick II
- Dedication
- Added in 1863: a prose letter to the French critic Joseph Milsand of Dijon, saying that the poem's 'stress' lay on the development of a soul
- Key themes
- The growth and failure of a poet; imagination against action; the poet's duty to the people; language and perception; history as progress; the problem of audience
- References
- By book and line (Sordello 3.716). Line numbers are counted in the text given on this site, with a divided verse line counted once; they may differ by a few lines from those of printed editions
Context
Browning began Sordello in the early 1830s, soon after his first published poem, Pauline (1833), and worked at it on and off for some seven years, laying it aside to write Paracelsus and Strafford. In the spring and summer of 1838 he made his first journey to Italy, partly to see the poem's country for himself; he visited Venice and the hill town of Asolo, both of which enter the finished poem. Sordello appeared in March 1840, its printing paid for by the poet's father. Browning meant it as the work that would establish him; it did the opposite, and for a generation his name was a byword for obscurity (DeVane 1955) (Maynard 1977) (Irvine 1974).
The historical Sordello was a troubadour from Goito, near Mantua, who wrote in Occitan, the literary language of southern France. Around 1226 he was involved in the abduction of Cunizza da Romano, sister of the Ghibelline lord Ezzelino III, from her husband, Count Rizzardo of San Bonifacio; he later left Italy for Provence, served Count Raymond Berenger and then Charles of Anjou, and followed Charles to the conquest of Naples in 1265–66. About forty of his poems survive, among them a famous lament for the Provencal baron Blacatz, which invites the cowardly princes of Europe to eat the dead man's heart (Sordello 1987). Dante made him a figure of patriotic dignity: in Purgatorio VI the solitary soul, hearing that Virgil is a Mantuan, embraces his fellow citizen, and the scene sets off Dante's great invective against a divided Italy; in the following cantos Sordello guides the poets to the valley of the negligent princes (Dante Alighieri 1973). Browning's poem names Dante at its outset and at its end, and Dante's Sordello, rather than the man of the documents, is the figure it sets out to explain.
The background is the struggle that divided the cities of thirteenth-century Italy between the Guelfs, who looked to the Pope, and the Ghibellines, who supported the Holy Roman Emperor, here Frederick II (Browning's 'Friedrich'). In the March of Treviso the Ghibelline house of Romano, led by Ecelin (Ezzelino II, called the Monk, who retired to a monastery) and later by his sons Ecelin III and Alberic, stood against the Guelf house of Este under Azzo VII and its ally Count Richard of San Bonifacio. The Romano captain Taurello Salinguerra held Ferrara. Browning read his history in Italian chronicles and histories, among them Muratori's collection of medieval chroniclers and Verci's history of the Ezzelini, and he compresses, invents and rearranges freely: Palma stands for the historical Cunizza, and Sordello's descent from Taurello is Browning's fiction (DeVane 1955) (Jack 1973) (Browning 1991).
The reception became a legend of its own. Reviewers complained that the poem could not be followed, and anecdotes multiplied: Tennyson is said to have remarked that he understood only the first line and the last, and that both were lies; Thomas Carlyle reported that his wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, had read the whole poem without being able to tell whether Sordello was a man, a city or a book. Browning's admirers, from the Pre-Raphaelites in the late 1840s to Swinburne, kept the poem alive as a test of serious reading (Litzinger 1970) (Irvine 1974) (Erickson 1984). Its difficulty has several sources: syntax compressed to the point of riddle, a history the reader is assumed to know, a plot told largely out of order, and a narrator who interrupts, apostrophises and argues with his audience.
In 1863, for the collected Poetical Works, Browning revised the text, clarifying some passages, adding running headlines to guide the reader, and prefacing it with a letter to his friend Joseph Milsand, the French critic who had written perceptively about him. There he said that the historical decoration had been meant as no more than a background, and that his stress lay on the development of a soul, the one thing worth study; he admitted that the poem had been found hard and did not apologise for it (Browning 1863) (Woolford 1988). In the twentieth century Sordello found its most influential reader in Ezra Pound, who took it as a model for a long poem that could hold history, myth and a poet's self-questioning together. The first drafts of The Cantos, published in 1917, argued with Browning directly, and Canto II still opens by addressing him: 'Hang it all, Robert Browning' (Pound 1996) (Bornstein 1977) (Flowers 1976).
Plot overview
The poem opens in Verona on a night in 1224, as the city hears that Taurello Salinguerra's Ferrara is besieged by the Guelfs. Before he will tell the story, the narrator summons his audience (living friends and the ghosts of dead poets) and turns back to Sordello's childhood at the castle of Goito near Mantua, where the boy, believed to be the orphan of an archer named Elcorte, grows up dreaming in solitude under the care of Adelaide, the wife of Ecelin da Romano. He imagines himself first in the lives of others, then as Apollo, and his ideal lady is Palma, Ecelin's daughter by an earlier marriage.
Wandering to Mantua, Sordello interrupts a Court of Love, takes over the song of the reigning troubadour Eglamor and completes it better, and is crowned by Palma; Eglamor dies of mortification. As the city's poet, Sordello struggles with language, which cannot render what he perceives whole, and with an audience that wants only entertainment. Divided between the man and the bard, he loses both, and when the politics of the house of Romano reach Mantua he throws his crown into the font at Goito and retires into nature.
Palma summons him to Verona: she loves him, she has learned secrets from Adelaide's deathbed, and she plans to make him the instrument of Taurello and the Ghibelline cause. The narrator breaks off in a long digression from a palace step in Venice, where a ragged girl becomes the image of the suffering humanity poetry must serve. At besieged Ferrara Sordello sees the misery war inflicts on the people, asks what either party truly stands for, and conceives a vision of Rome, the ideal city of law, as the cause he should serve. He urges Taurello to join the Guelfs for the people's sake; Taurello, amused, throws the imperial badge round the young man's neck, and it is revealed that Sordello is Taurello's own son, saved as an infant and hidden by Adelaide.
Offered power, a bride and the leadership of the Ghibellines, Sordello is left alone for the night to choose between taking power for himself and serving the people through the party he believes right. When Palma and Taurello return, he is dead, the badge under his foot. Taurello abandons his ambitions and is absorbed into the house of Romano; the narrator runs through the bloody later history of Ecelin III and Alberic, reflects on what Sordello might have been, and ends with a child on a hill near Asolo singing a fragment of Sordello's song, all that is left of him.
Book by book
Book 1: Verona, the Narrator and the Boy at Goito
Book the First (about 1,000 lines)
Summary
The narrator announces his story and explains why he must appear in it himself, instead of letting Sordello speak in his own person as a dramatist would. He gathers his audience, the living and the ghosts of great poets, and bids the shade of a revered poet (generally taken to be Shelley) stay away. Then the past opens and Verona appears on a night in 1224: news has come that Count Richard of San Bonifacio and Azzo of Este have attacked Ferrara, held by Taurello Salinguerra for Ecelin da Romano. The narrator sketches the feud of Guelfs and Ghibellines, Pope and Emperor, and introduces the leading houses, then turns aside to compare two kinds of poetic soul and to warn that Sordello's end will be piteous.
The story now goes back some thirty years to Goito, a castle in the marshes near Mantua, with its maple-panelled room and its vault where a stone font is held up by marble caryatids. Here Sordello grows up, supposedly the son of Elcorte, an archer who died saving Adelaide. A solitary child, he lives in fancies, first entering into the lives of everything around him, then casting himself as the hero of every story, and at last as Apollo, with the beautiful Palma as the lady of his dreams. Time passes; the book ends as Adelaide comes out of seclusion and an accident breaks in on his dream.
Analysis
Book 1 is the hardest place to begin, because it does three things at once: it sets out the poem's method, crowds in a dense history, and starts a psychological case study. The opening refusal to use the dramatic method of 'making speak' the man himself is important. Browning, who would become the master of the dramatic monologue, here chooses to narrate and comment, and the narrator's presence, with his apostrophes, apologies and arguments, becomes one of the poem's subjects (Tucker 1980) (Ryals 1983).
The boy at Goito is a portrait of a type the narrator analyses: a soul that would rather enjoy the whole world in imagination than act within its limits. His fancies pass from sympathy with others to self-worship, and the progression is an argument about Romantic imagination: what begins as receptiveness turns into the wish to be everything at once. The marble caryatids who bear the weight of the font, grieving and patient, stand at the centre of his childhood and return at the end of the poem (Maynard 1977) (Jack 1973).
Who will, may hear Sordello's story told: His story? Who believes me shall behold The man, pursue his fortunes to the end,
The first line is the one Tennyson reportedly claimed to understand, and the invitation is already a challenge: the reader must believe the narrator in order to see the man. The poem's last line will answer it.
Verona! stay — thou, spirit, come not near Now — not this time desert thy cloudy place To scare me, thus employed, with that pure face!
The 'spirit' with the 'pure face', usually identified as Shelley, is the dead poet Browning had idolised in Pauline. Banishing him from the audience suggests a wish to tell this story without the pressure of that example.
A dullish gray-streaked cumbrous font, a group Round it, each side of it, where'er one sees, Upholds it; shrinking Caryatides
The font and its stone maidens: a figure of burdens borne in silence. Sordello sits among them as a child, throws his crown into the font in Book 2, and is buried in it at the end.
Book 2: Mantua: Triumph and Failure of a Poet
Book the Second (about 1,020 lines)
Summary
Wandering out of Goito, Sordello reaches Mantua as a Court of Love is ending. The reigning troubadour, Eglamor, sings a song of Elys; Sordello, who knows the story, sees how the song falls short, takes it up and finishes it, and wins the prize from Palma, who lays her scarf on him. Eglamor dies of chagrin; Sordello lays the crown on the dead poet's breast. Eglamor, a careful craftsman for whom verse was a ritual, is defined as Sordello's opposite.
Sordello learns the supposed truth of his birth (the archer Elcorte who saved Adelaide in the burning of Vicenza on the night Ecelin's son was born) and becomes Palma's minstrel at Mantua. Fame brings problems. He tries to fashion a new poetic language, but language breaks up the whole perceptions he wants to convey; his audience, led by the critic-minstrel Naddo, wants approved styles and easy sense; and he divides himself between the man who lives and the poet who performs. When Adelaide dies and Ecelin retires to a monastery, Taurello comes to Mantua and expects a song; Sordello goes back to Goito, throws his crown and Palma's scarf into the font, and is a poet no more.
Analysis
This book is Browning's most direct account of the problems of a modern poet: originality, audience and language. The famous passage on perception and thought argues that language, which works by parts and in sequence, cannot hold a perception that is whole and simultaneous, so the poet is condemned to break what he sees in order to say it. Critics have seen in it both a Romantic theory of vision and an anticipation of Browning's own crowded, elliptical style (Armstrong 1993) (Christ 1984).
Naddo, with his maxims and his cautious praise, is the first of Browning's satirical portraits of critics and the public. Eglamor, though defeated, is treated with unexpected tenderness: he gave himself entirely to his art and asked nothing beyond it, and in Book 6 the narrator will set him above the victor. The split between 'Man' and 'Poet' anticipates the poem's central problem, the gap between knowing and acting (Ryals 1983) (Erickson 1984).
Because perceptions whole, like that he sought To clothe, reject so pure a work of thought As language: thought may take perception's place
The heart of the argument about language: the wholeness of what the poet perceives refuses the piecemeal medium of words.
So could I pluck a cup, put in one song A single sight, did not my hand, too strong, Twitch in the least the root-strings of the whole.
Sordello's image of the water-plant in the castle moat: pluck one cup and the whole pool comes with it. He cannot isolate a single subject because everything he sees is connected to everything else.
" I shall be king again! " as he withdrew The envied scarf; into the font he threw His crown.
The renunciation at the font. The half-line 'His crown.' falls with a thud; Sordello's 'king again' means that he will return to imaginary sovereignty in solitude.
Book 3: Palma's Plan and the Venice Digression
Book the Third (about 1,025 lines)
Summary
At Goito nature slowly washes the Mantuan years out of Sordello, but he finds that he has wasted his youth and longs for real life. A summons comes from Palma, and at Verona she tells him her story: her loveless betrothal to Count Richard, Adelaide's death and what Adelaide revealed, the elder Ecelin's withdrawal to the monastery at Oliero, and her plan to join Sordello with Taurello, the true strength of the house of Romano, to serve the Emperor's cause. Sordello resolves to become the 'gate-vein' of Lombardy, the soul of a body of men.
Then the narrator breaks off. He is sitting on a ruined palace step in Venice, in his own day, looking at the peasant girls of Asolo and Bassano, and he asks which of them could be queen of his poem. Instead he chooses a 'sad dishevelled ghost', a ragged, tearful woman who stands for suffering humanity, and declares that his poem is for her. He defends his choice of a difficult subject, addresses friends in England, tells a satirical tale of the poet Plara and the parable of St John at the house of Xanthus, and returns to his task: the book ends with the promise 'And you shall hear Sordello's story told.'
Analysis
The digression at Venice is the poem's turning point, and many readers find it its finest passage. Browning has carried Sordello to the moment when he must decide what his gifts are for, and he pauses to ask the same question of himself. Choosing the ragged woman over the pretty queens commits the poem to the claims of the many, the unhappy and the unseen; Venice, a stripe of life hung between two blues of sea and sky, becomes an image of human existence, good and evil mixed (Tucker 1980) (Armstrong 1993).
Palma is the only character who acts with clear purpose, and her speech gives the reader the political plot that Book 1 had left obscure. She is not a dreamer's ideal but a strong-willed woman with her own aims; Browning's identification of her with Dante's Cunizza in Book 5 ties her to a woman whose loves Dante forgave in the heaven of Venus (Jack 1973) (Browning 1991).
You sad dishevelled ghost That pluck at me and point, are you advised
The ghost of suffering humanity, who plucks at the poet and points. The whole poem's social conscience is concentrated in this figure.
Much old requirement. Venice seems a type Of Life, — 'twixt blue and blue extends, a stripe, As Life, the somewhat, hangs 'twixt nought and nought:
Venice as a type of life: a thin habitable stripe between two immensities. The image is playful and exact.
Each a god's germ, doomed to remain a germ In unexpanded infancy, unless . . .
The narrator's summary of his subject: souls with divine potential that cannot unfold within the limits of a single life. The broken-off 'unless . . .' holds the poem's hope.
Book 4: Ferrara and the Vision of Rome
Book the Fourth (about 1,030 lines)
Summary
Ferrara lies wretched after the siege: Guelfs and Ghibellines alike suffer, and the people curse both parties. Envoys arrive to treat for the captured Count Richard, the Emperor's representative Tito is expected, and Taurello broods in his palace among statues once meant to please his young wife Retrude. The book tells Taurello's history: his rise as the indispensable captain of Romano, the burning of Vicenza in which he believed his wife and infant son died, his subordination of his own great abilities to the cautious Ecelin.
Sordello, arriving with Palma, walks among the soldiers and the poor and finds that neither party has any real concern for the multitude. He asks Palma what a Ghibelline is, and whether there is a cause beyond both factions. A soldier who was once a friar tells him of Crescentius, the tenth-century Roman consul who tried to restore the Roman republic and was put to death. In a flash Sordello sees his cause: Rome, the city of law, the model of a just society, which he imagines rising again with him as its builder. At dawn he goes out among the people to test his dream.
Analysis
Book 4 brings the poem out of the mind into history, and its picture of a city wrecked by faction is one of the most concrete things in Browning's early work. The reader sees why Sordello's development matters: the poet who has lived among dreams must now relate his vision to actual, suffering people. Taurello, introduced here at length, is his opposite: a man of pure action who has never asked what his actions are for (Ryals 1983) (Jack 1973).
The vision of Rome is both noble and suspect. Rome stands for law, continuity and the rights of humanity, and Sordello's conversion to the people's cause reflects the liberal and reforming sympathies of Browning's 1830s circle. But it is also another of his total, imaginative possessions, the whole seized at once, and Book 5 will show it crumbling as soon as it meets the actual people (Erickson 1984) (Browning 1991).
Nor, of the great Two, either principle, Struggled to change — but to possess — Rome, still, Guelf Rome or Ghibellin Rome.
The narrator's diagnosis of the Guelf and Ghibelline quarrel: neither party wants to change the world, only to own it.
Rome typifies the scheme to put mankind Once more in full possession of their rights.
Rome as a political idea, the restoration of mankind's rights. The language anticipates the reforming liberalism of the poet's own century.
Book 5: The Badge and the Secret of Birth
Book the Fifth (about 1,030 lines)
Summary
By evening the Rome of Sordello's dream has fallen arch by arch: the actual people are too squalid and too various for his ideal city. A voice within him (the poem suggests it is his own better insight) teaches that a man is given two sights, the whole of time's completed plan and the single step that is his own to take, and that collective humanity outstrips the individual; it traces the progress of poets and of societies by stages. Sordello resolves to take the first step: he will persuade Taurello to give up the Emperor's cause and help the Guelfs, for the people's sake.
Before Taurello and Palma he argues his case, but his rhetoric fails as he becomes divided between the man who feels and the man who speaks. Taurello, amused, talks of his own career, says he was born to serve and Sordello born to rule, and on a whim throws the imperial badge across the young man's neck, making him head of Romano's party. Then the truth emerges: Palma reveals what Adelaide confessed on her deathbed, that on the night of the burning of Vicenza Retrude and her child were carried off to Goito, where Retrude died, and that Adelaide raised Taurello's son as the archer's child to keep Taurello from overshadowing Romano. Taurello, transformed, pours out plans for his son's greatness; then a footstep calls him and Palma away, and Sordello is left alone.
Analysis
The recognition scene belongs to romance, but Browning uses it to sharpen a moral choice. Until now Sordello's sympathy with the people has cost him nothing; now the badge offers him exactly the power he has always craved, along with a father and the woman he loves. The scene is ironic and moving at once: Taurello, the great servant who never ruled, sees in his son the master he could not be (Tucker 1980) (Ryals 1983).
The speech of the inner voice contains the poem's philosophy of progress: individual genius serves a collective human development that unfolds step by step. It also gives a theory of the history of poetry, from poets who tell what they see to poets who make others see for themselves, which critics read as Browning's argument for the more demanding art he was moving towards (Armstrong 1993) (Langbaum 1957). The reference to Dante's Cunizza, near the end of the book, links Palma to the heaven of Venus in Paradiso IX.
God has conceded two sights to a man — One, of men's whole work, time's completed plan, The other, of the minute's work, man's first
The two sights, of the whole plan and of the single step. Sordello's failure throughout has been to want the last step first.
Read the black writing — that collective man Outstrips the individual! Who began
The inner voice's lesson: humanity as a whole progresses beyond any single genius.
And the badge was thrown Across Sordello's neck: " This badge alone Makes you Romano's Head — becomes superb
Taurello's impulsive gesture. The badge, emblem of imperial power, will be the object of Sordello's final decision.
Book 6: The Night of Decision and the Death of Sordello
Book the Sixth (about 890 lines)
Summary
Alone on the terrace at night, Sordello weighs his choice. To accept the badge would gratify his old desire for power, would make him his father's son and Palma's husband, and might even let him do good; to reject it and serve the Guelfs would be to choose a party he can see is only partly right, for the sake of a good he may never see accomplished. He questions the relation of soul and body, the value of service, the need of a power above the self that can be loved. The narrator intervenes on his behalf. Palma and Taurello return and find him dead, the badge beneath his foot and a look of triumph in his eyes. He is buried in the font at Goito.
The narrator then runs through the aftermath. Taurello makes peace, abandons his great hope, marries into the house of Romano and is absorbed into it; the later careers and terrible deaths of Ecelin III and Alberic are told with grim relish, and the narrator recalls visiting their country. He returns to Eglamor, whose humble love of art has its reward, and sums up Sordello's failure: the legend made him a hero of chronicles, but the one step he would not take was left for Dante. The poem ends near Asolo, where a barefoot child runs up the hill singing a few words of Sordello's song, and with the line 'Who would has heard Sordello's story told.'
Analysis
Readers have long disagreed whether Sordello's death is defeat or victory. He dies without acting, but he dies refusing power, and the triumph in his eyes suggests that he has seen something at the end. The narrator's verdict is mixed: Sordello was a tree that 'covets fruitage' yet never tastes itself, a soul too large and too self-regarding for its world, whose real successor was Dante (Tucker 1980) (Jack 1973) (Browning 1991).
The ending shrinks the whole story to a fragment of song in a child's mouth, and the last line answers the first. The poem has kept its promise to tell the story, but only those who would hear it have heard it. That joke, which Tennyson turned against the poem, is also Browning's quiet statement of the kind of reader the poem needs: one who chooses to listen (Erickson 1984) (Litzinger 1970).
Aside — and you divine who sat there dead, Under his foot the badge: still, Palma said,
The discovery of Sordello's death, told in a broken sentence. The badge under his foot is the poem's sign that he has rejected the power it offered.
Passed with posterity, to all intents, For just the God he never could become.
The irony of reputation: chronicle and legend made Sordello the hero he could never be in fact.
Up and up goes he, singing all the while Some unintelligible words to beat The lark, God's poet, swooning at his feet,
The child on the hill near Asolo, the last image of Sordello's legacy: a song that survives in fragments, sung without being understood.
Characters
Sordello and his circle
- Sordello
- A poet of genius raised at Goito, believed to be the son of the archer Elcorte and in fact the son of Taurello Salinguerra and Retrude. Imaginative, proud and self-absorbed, he wants to possess the whole of life at once and so cannot act within its limits. He triumphs as a minstrel at Mantua, abandons poetry, discovers a political cause in the people, and dies on the night he is offered power. Browning's figure owes its name, birthplace and dignity to the historical troubadour and to Dante, but its psychology is Browning's own invention.
- Palma
- Daughter of Ecelin da Romano by his first wife, Agnes of Este, and Sordello's dream-lady from childhood. Strong-minded and politically shrewd, she loves Sordello, plans to make him the leader of the Romano cause with Taurello, and reveals the secret of his birth. Browning identifies her with Cunizza da Romano, whom Dante places in the heaven of Venus (Paradiso IX).
Romano and the Ghibellines
- Taurello Salinguerra
- The great captain of the house of Romano, master of Ferrara, about sixty when the story begins. A man of action and humour who has always served others, he believes his wife and son died in the burning of Vicenza. Learning that Sordello is his son, he dreams briefly of greatness through him, and after his son's death abandons ambition. He is based on the historical Salinguerra Torelli of Ferrara.
- Ecelin da Romano (the elder)
- Ezzelino II, called the Monk, head of the Ghibelline house of Romano, cautious and superstitious; he relies on Taurello's strength and on his wife Adelaide's schemes, and retires to a monastery at Oliero.
- Adelaide
- Ecelin's second wife, a subtle and secretive schemer, mistress of Goito. To prevent Taurello from overshadowing the house of Romano she hid his infant son and raised him as the archer's child. She dies before the main action, confessing the truth to Palma.
- Ecelin III and Alberic
- The sons of the elder Ecelin. Young Ecelin, born on the night of the burning of Vicenza, becomes the notorious tyrant of the March; Alberic his brother. The narrator tells their savage later careers and deaths in Book 6.
- Retrude
- Taurello's young wife, from the imperial court of Sicily, for whose sake he filled his palace at Ferrara with Sicilian marvels. Carried off from the burning of Vicenza with her child, she died at Goito and was laid in the font that Taurello himself had given.
- Elcorte
- An archer who, the story goes, died saving Adelaide at Vicenza; Sordello is passed off as his orphan.
Este and the Guelfs
- Azzo VII of Este
- Lord of Este and leader of the Guelf party in the March, Taurello's chief enemy.
- Count Richard of San Bonifacio
- Guelf lord of Verona and Azzo's ally, captured at Ferrara; Palma's intended husband in the political plans of Book 3.
Poets and critics
- Eglamor
- The reigning troubadour at Mantua, a painstaking craftsman for whom verse is a kind of worship. Defeated by Sordello, he dies of it; the narrator later honours his humility and love of art. The name is Browning's invention.
- Naddo
- A minstrel and self-appointed critic, Sordello's friend and adviser at Mantua, full of conventional opinions and safe precepts: Browning's portrait of the reading public and its arbiters. 'only Naddo's never gone!', the narrator says at the end of Book 5.
Historical and framing figures
- Frederick II
- 'Friedrich', the Hohenstaufen emperor whose coming into Lombardy the Ghibellines await; he remains offstage.
- Dante
- Invoked at the beginning and the end. The poem implies that Dante took the step Sordello would not, and that his honouring of Sordello in Purgatorio VI is what the poem seeks to understand.
- The narrator
- A modern poet, close to Browning himself, who tells the story, comments, digresses and argues with his audience. He sits on a palace step in Venice in Book 3 and visits the Romano country in Book 6.
Themes
The development of a soul
Browning's 1863 dedication names the poem's subject as the incidents in the development of a soul, and the six books follow Sordello's mind from childish fancy through artistic triumph, disillusion, political awakening and final choice. The story is less a sequence of events than a sequence of states of mind, each tested against the world.
Sordello's characteristic fault is to want everything at once: to be all the heroes, to say the whole perception, to rebuild Rome in a day. The poem argues that a human life must proceed step by step, and that the refusal of limited action is a form of self-love (Ryals 1983) (Tucker 1980).
The poet and the people
From the Venice digression on, the poem asks what poetry owes to suffering humanity. Sordello's discovery of the multitude at Ferrara is a political conversion as well as a moral one, and the narrator makes the same choice in his own person when he takes the ragged woman for his queen.
The theme links the poem to the reform politics of the 1830s and to Browning's lifelong interest in the poet's social role, but the poem is also sceptical: love of 'the people' in the abstract can be one more dream (Armstrong 1993) (Erickson 1984).
Language, perception and audience
Sordello's Mantuan crisis turns on the gap between what the poet sees and what words can say, and on the gap between what the poet says and what his audience will hear. Language is successive and partial; vision is whole. An audience like Naddo's wants the familiar.
These are the problems Browning's own poem raised for its first readers, and Sordello can be read as an account, from within, of the difficulty it creates (Christ 1984) (Woolford 1988).
Knowledge and action
Sordello is repeatedly divided between the self who feels and the self who acts or speaks. Taurello is his opposite, all action and no reflection. Neither alone is complete, and the poem's plot brings father and son together only to separate them for ever.
The question is a Victorian one, close to Carlyle's demand that the man of genius act in the world, and Browning gives it no easy answer (Langbaum 1957) (Jack 1973).
History and progress
The poem places one life inside the long movement of human history, from Crescentius' Rome to Dante to the narrator's Venice. The inner voice of Book 5 states a doctrine of progress: collective humanity advances beyond any single genius, step by step.
History is also violence, faction and waste, as the closing account of the Romano brothers shows; the poem holds hope and horror together (Browning 1991) (DeVane 1955).
Identity and parentage
Sordello's sense of himself is built on a false story of his birth, and the truth comes only when it can no longer shape his life. The revelation that the dreamer is the son of the man of action turns the poem's argument about imagination and power into a family drama.
Motifs
Crowns, scarves and badges
Palma's scarf and the Mantuan crown, thrown into the font; the imperial badge, thrown across Sordello's neck and found under his foot. Each token of honour or power marks a stage in his relation to the world.
Apollo
The god of poetry is the role the boy plays in his fancies; the story of his birth, when he learns it, explains Apollo away; and in Book 6 the narrator says that Apollo might have been 'compassed' had Sordello taken the step he refused.
The story told
The refrain line about 'Sordello's story told' frames the whole poem and the end of Book 3, each time in a new tense: 'may hear', 'shall hear', 'has heard'.
Steps
The 'one step' Sordello will not take, the first and last steps of the inner voice in Book 5, and the narrator's palace step at Venice: the poem's figure for limited, actual progress.
Dawn and evening
Sordello's resolutions come at dawn and fail by evening; the poem's crises fall at sunset and in the night, and its last scene is a sunrise near Asolo.
Symbols
The font and the caryatids
A stone basin at Goito upheld by marble maidens who seem to grieve under their load. Taurello's gift to Retrude, it receives her body, Sordello's crown and finally Sordello himself; it suggests the burden of the world borne patiently, which Sordello cannot accept.
The badge
The imperial token of Romano's party, standing for power and for the father's world. Sordello's death with the badge beneath his foot is the poem's single, ambiguous gesture of choice.
Rome
The ideal city of law and human rights in Sordello's vision of Book 4, which falls 'arch by arch' in Book 5. It stands for any total political ideal imposed at a stroke.
The dishevelled ghost
The ragged woman of the Venice digression, standing for suffering humanity, whom the narrator chooses as the true queen and patron of his poem.
Critical debates
Is the obscurity a failure or a method?
Victorian readers took the difficulty of Sordello as a failure of art, and Browning's 1863 revisions and headlines admit the problem to a degree. Many modern critics argue that the difficulty is purposeful: a poem about the gap between vision and language, and about the poet's need for an active reader, demands that the reader work.
Lee Erickson places the poem within the changing literary market of the 1830s and Browning's uneasy relations with his public; Isobel Armstrong reads its difficult syntax as a deliberate, politically charged poetics. Others still see a young poet attempting too much in too little space (Erickson 1984) (Armstrong 1993) (Litzinger 1970).
Sordello and Browning's own development
Sordello sits between the confessional poems of Browning's youth, Pauline and Paracelsus, and the dramatic monologues of the 1840s. Critics debate whether it is the last of the first kind, a self-portrait at one remove, or the first step towards the second, in which the poet withdraws behind his speakers.
Herbert Tucker reads Browning's early work as an art of continual beginning and deferred closure, with Sordello as a crucial instance; Clyde de L. Ryals traces the poet's growth through the poems and plays of 1833–46; John Maynard reconstructs the young Browning's reading and circle; Robert Langbaum's account of the dramatic monologue explains what Browning gained by leaving the narrative method of Sordello behind (Tucker 1980) (Ryals 1983) (Maynard 1977) (Langbaum 1957).
Does Sordello fail, or triumph, in his death?
Sordello dies without acting, and the narrator's verdict calls his life 'a sorry farce'. Yet he rejects the badge and dies with a look of triumph, and some readers take his end as a spiritual victory: the self-centred dreamer at last recognises a power above himself.
Ian Jack stresses the narrator's judgement of a soul that would not accept limits; other critics read the death as the poem's admission that the problem it set cannot be solved in one life, and connect it to the poem's hope of progress beyond the individual (Jack 1973) (Tucker 1980) (Browning 1991).
History or background?
The 1863 dedication says the history is only background to the development of a soul. Yet the poem is crowded with dates, names, factions and sieges, and Browning read widely in chronicles to get them. Critics disagree how far to take his word.
William Clyde DeVane and the Longman editors document the historical sources and Browning's free alterations of them; Erickson and Armstrong argue that the political history is integral to the poem's argument about poetry and the people (DeVane 1955) (Browning 1991) (Erickson 1984) (Armstrong 1993).
The narrator and the Venice digression
Is the narrator a fault, an intrusive commentator who obscures the story, or the poem's real subject? The Venice digression, in which he chooses his patron and his purpose, is often read as the moment the poem becomes about its author's own vocation.
Critics of Browning's revisions note that the 1863 text partly tames this voice; readers interested in the Romantic inheritance see in it Browning's attempt to move beyond Shelley's example while keeping his idealism (Woolford 1988) (Tucker 1980) (Maynard 1977).
The text of 1840 and the text of 1863
Browning revised Sordello for the Poetical Works of 1863 and added the dedication and running headlines; further small changes followed in later collected editions. Editors differ on whether to print the first edition, which reflects the poem as the young Browning made it, or the revised text, which represents his later intentions.
The Ohio and Longman editions record the variants; John Woolford's study of Browning as a reviser treats revision as part of the poet's art (Browning 1970) (Browning 1991) (Woolford 1988). The text on this site is the revised one.
Sordello and modernism
Ezra Pound's early drafts of The Cantos began by arguing with Browning's poem, and Canto II opens by addressing him. Critics debate how much the Cantos owe to Sordello: the mixing of history and myth, the intrusive and self-questioning poet, the elliptical style, the use of the troubadours.
George Bornstein and Betty S. Flowers study the line from Browning to Pound and other modernists; Hugh Kenner places Pound's use of Browning within the larger story of his poetic; Carol T. Christ shows how Victorian and modernist poetics share more than the modernists admitted (Bornstein 1977) (Flowers 1976) (Kenner 1971) (Christ 1984) (Pound 1996).
Key passages
Lo, the Past is hurled In twain: up-thrust, out-staggering on the world, Subsiding into shape, a darkness rears Its outline, kindles at the core, appears
The past opens like a stage or a landscape after an earthquake, and Verona rises out of darkness. The passage shows the poem's visual power and its method of compressed, rushing syntax, and makes the act of recovering history a kind of creation.
So that Sordello . . . Fool, who spied the mark Of leprosy upon him, violet-dark Already as he loiters? Born just now,
The narrator breaks into his own analysis of the kind of soul Sordello has, as if he had seen a fatal disease on him. The 'leprosy' is the self-absorbed wish to be everything at once; the image warns the reader early that the story will end in failure.
A plant they have yielding a three-leaved bell Which whitens at the heart ere noon, and ails Till evening; evening gives it to her gales
After Eglamor's death, the narrator describes a flower said to bear his name, which whitens and fades in a day. The modest, short-lived flower is a fitting memorial for the humble craftsman, and the tenderness of the passage prepares for his rehabilitation in Book 6.
You sad dishevelled ghost That pluck at me and point, are you advised
From a palace step in Venice the narrator turns from the pretty peasant girls to a ragged, weeping woman, who stands for suffering humanity. His choice of her as his 'queen' commits the poem to serving those whom fortune leaves out, and it parallels the choice that Sordello will face.
Each a god's germ, doomed to remain a germ In unexpanded infancy, unless . . .
The narrator states the poem's subject: souls with a god's potential that remain undeveloped because they cannot accept the limits of the world. The sentence is broken off at 'unless', leaving open what might bring such a soul to growth.
Nor, of the great Two, either principle, Struggled to change — but to possess — Rome, still, Guelf Rome or Ghibellin Rome.
Sordello's insight at Ferrara: the Guelf and Ghibelline parties do not want to change the world, only to possess it. The passage explains why he looks for a cause beyond both, and finds it in the idea of Rome.
God has conceded two sights to a man — One, of men's whole work, time's completed plan, The other, of the minute's work, man's first
The voice that wakes Sordello from his collapsed dream distinguishes the vision of time's whole plan from the single step a man can take now. It names his lifelong error, to want the end without the means, and gives the poem its ethic of limited, progressive action.
To Palma, Dante spoke with in the clear Amorous silence of the Swooning-sphere, — Cunizza, as he called her! Never ask
The narrator identifies Palma with Cunizza, whom Dante meets in the heaven of Venus. The allusion ties Browning's invented heroine to the historical woman Sordello is said to have carried off, and to Dante's forgiving treatment of her.
A tree that covets fruitage and yet tastes Never itself, itself. Had he embraced
The narrator's final judgement on Sordello: a tree that wants fruit but never tastes its own. The image sums up a life of ambition without fulfilment, desire without action.
Who would has heard Sordello's story told.
The last line answers the first ('Who will, may hear'). The story has been told, but only to those willing to hear it. Tennyson's joke that both lines were lies turned this against the poem; it can also be read as Browning's description of the reader he wanted.
Questions for study
Why does Browning narrate Sordello instead of using the dramatic method he says he would have preferred?
Look at the opening of Book 1, where he explains his choice, and at the narrator's interventions in Books 3 and 6; consider what the poem gains, and loses, from a commentator.
What does Sordello's childhood at Goito show about the kind of mind he has?
Trace the stages of his fancies, from entering into the lives of things to imagining himself Apollo, and the narrator's warning about 'leprosy' in Book 1.
Compare Sordello and Eglamor as poets. Why does the narrator honour Eglamor at the end?
Think about craft against genius, humility against ambition, and the flower in Book 2; then look at the passage on Eglamor in Book 6.
What is Sordello's problem with language in Book 2, and how might it relate to Browning's own style?
Consider the passage on perception and thought, the image of the water-plant, and the complaints of the poem's first readers.
What does the Venice digression in Book 3 add to the poem?
Think about the ragged woman as the narrator's 'queen', the image of Venice as a type of life, and how the narrator's choice anticipates Sordello's.
How does the poem present the conflict of Guelfs and Ghibellines?
Look at the misery of Ferrara in Book 4 and Sordello's conclusion that neither party wants to change the world, only to possess it.
What does Rome mean to Sordello, and why does his vision collapse?
Compare the end of Book 4 with the opening of Book 5, and the inner voice's teaching about the first and last steps.
Is Sordello's death a failure or a victory?
Consider the badge under his foot, the triumph in his eyes, and the narrator's mixed verdict near the end of Book 6.
Why does Browning link his Sordello with Dante's?
Think about Purgatorio VI, the invocation of Dante in Book 1, the identification of Palma with Cunizza in Book 5, and the claim in Book 6 that Dante took the step Sordello spurned.
Why might Pound and other modernists have found in Sordello a model for their own long poems?
Consider the mixing of history and myth, the self-conscious narrator, the elliptical style, and the poet's relation to his audience.
Further reading
- Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics. London: Routledge, 1993.
- Bornstein, George. The Postromantic Consciousness of Ezra Pound. English Literary Studies. Victoria, B.C.: University of Victoria, 1977.
- Browning, Robert. Sordello. London: Edward Moxon, 1840.
- Browning, Robert. The Complete Works of Robert Browning: With Variant Readings and Annotations. Vol. 2. Edited by Roma A. King, Jr., et al. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1970.
- Browning, Robert. The Poems of Browning. Vol. 1, 1826–1840. Edited by John Woolford and Daniel Karlin. Longman Annotated English Poets. London: Longman, 1991.
- Browning, Robert. The Poems. Edited by John Pettigrew, supplemented and completed by Thomas J. Collins. 2 vols. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.
- Browning, Robert. The Poetical Works of Robert Browning. 3 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1863.
- Christ, Carol T. Victorian and Modern Poetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
- Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy. Translated, with a commentary, by Charles S. Singleton. Purgatorio. 2 vols. Bollingen Series 80. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973.
- DeVane, William Clyde. A Browning Handbook. 2nd ed. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1955.
- Erickson, Lee. Robert Browning: His Poetry and His Audiences. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984.
- Flowers, Betty S. Browning and the Modern Tradition. London: Macmillan, 1976.
- Hair, Donald S. Browning's Experiments with Genre. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972.
- Irvine, William, and Park Honan. The Book, the Ring, and the Poet: A Biography of Robert Browning. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974.
- Jack, Ian. Browning's Major Poetry. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973.
- Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.
- Langbaum, Robert. The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition. London: Chatto and Windus, 1957.
- Litzinger, Boyd, and Donald Smalley, eds. Browning: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970.
- Maynard, John. Browning's Youth. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977.
- Pound, Ezra. The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1996.
- Ryals, Clyde de L. Becoming Browning: The Poems and Plays of Robert Browning, 1833–1846. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983.
- Sordello. The Poetry of Sordello. Edited and translated by James J. Wilhelm. Garland Library of Medieval Literature. New York: Garland, 1987.
- Tucker, Herbert F., Jr. Browning's Beginnings: The Art of Disclosure. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980.
- Woolford, John. Browning the Revisionary. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988.
Written by the Poetry Codex editors. Updated 2026-10-19.