At the very end of The Ring and the Book Browning delivers one of the most staggering mule-kicks ever meted out by an author to his readers. Bear in mind that the poem is more than 21,000 lines of blank verse - about twice the length of Paradise Lost. It was published in four monthly instalments, each containing three books of the poem, which appeared from November 1868 to February 1869. Browning, like Melville, was asking Jonah to swallow the whale. But even Melville might have blenched at Browning's final exordium:

So, British Public, who may like me yet,
(Marry and amen!) learn one lesson hence
Of many which whatever lives should teach:
This lesson, that our human speech is naught,
Our human testimony false, our fame
And human estimation words and wind.

So that's it. The British Public might reasonably ask, after 12 books and 21,000 lines of human speech, testimony and estimation, whether the message couldn't have been delivered a little more crisply. Thomas Carlyle certainly thought so: the poem, he declared, was 'all made out of an Old Bailey story that might have been told in ten lines and only wants forgetting'.

LRB 23 May 2002 | PDF Download