What proves fascinating about this poem is the extent to which it interacts with Browning's personal concerns and aesthetic beliefs, in spite of the very specific subject matter of the poem. His characters are all beset by anxieties about finishing, about endings, about completion. Guido is concerned by his impending execution and by the fact that his inability to finish off the job of killing his wife leads directly to his own finishing-off.. She survives long enough to indict him, but is herself worried about her slide into death from the injuries she sustained, and eventually wishes it to come swiftly - 'What o'the way to the end? --the end crowns all'. The Pope is ageing, and cannot be far from death himself. All this comes in a poem where the recurring motif is completion. The twelve-book structure is set out in advance, so that despite its initial publication in four sections, the contemporary readership would have been fully aware of where and when the poem was going to end. The trial itself is something of a foregone conclusion, merely a case of going through the judicial motions. The ring of the title is a well-known emblem of wholeness and circularity. The linguistic concerns of the poem, then, embody the preoccupations of the narrative. The word 'end' occurs 202 times in the poem, and it is no accident that nearly half of these are situated at the end of a line.

As for Browning's own thoughts on the subject, one should turn to his poem 'A Grammarian's Funeral';

That low man goes on adding one to one,
His hundred's soon hit:
This high man, aiming at a million,
Misses an unit.

The poet clearly finds more worth in the activities of the 'high man'. For Browning, if you can complete a task, it isn't enough of a challenge to be worthy of greatness. This might explain why so many of his famous poems, for instance 'Fra Lippo Lippi' and 'My Last Duchess', are left open-ended, merely providing windows into a longer timescale of events. His courtship correspondence with Elizabeth Barrett is a studied exercise in procrastination, taking immense pleasure in delaying the consummation of their relationship. With this in mind, then, why is Browning's longest work based on truth, based on the premise of setting everything down on paper, creating a complete record? 'Here it is, all i'the book at last', he proclaims in the first book.

The irony is that although his text does do full poetic justice to the documents that Browning had discovered, The Ring and The Book does not represent a full exposition of the Comparini trial. Altick writes in his Appendix that 'a considerable body of material unknown to him came to light in several instalments' after his death. Browning's greatest attempt at completion, in the belief that the subject matter was one that he could master totally, is flawed. His one significant exception proves his rule.

This context is what makes The Ring and The Book such a curious poem, but even without the framework which Browning's artistic credo places around it, it has many merits. It is, at heart, a great detective story, a predecessor of the TV courtroom drama. It has narrative compulsion - not often a quality associated with poems of this length - and Browning's linguistic mastery is forever throwing up resonant phrases, which add to the poem's texture, but also shine in their own right. The Ring and The Book is often excerpted in anthologies, but it deserves to be read, in sequence, in its entirety. It is a very long poem, something of a marathon, but the reader's stamina is rewarded many times over.