Drowning In Browning

I think I've figured out how to read Browning. Let me make that a bit more specific: a way for me to read Browning's The Ring and the Book that brings the magic that is undoubtedly in the poem into the lazy mind of this reader.

The poem presents problems of scale and density of detail for me, and I've never been much good at following complex plots. But I've discovered that reading each book with the sort of synopsis of the particular speaker of that book that Browning gives in Book 1 directly in mind, in other words re-reading as you go, is surprisingly helpful. You get pointed to the essence of what's going on. Now I'm only in Book 2, Half-Rome, which I've read before but I'm confident doing this will pay dividends for all the other books.

Secondly, I'm finding that deliberately stopping and re-reading substantial sections, hard on the heels of the first reading, I'm talking here of roughly 400 line blocks, lends an intensity to the second reading that makes me feel I'm genuinely responding to, rather than simply coping with the poem. It's as if the first reading is needed simply to get the drift, sort out the surface puzzles of meaning and attune oneself to what Browning is after. For me it's a cold reading. Mysteriously the reading that follows coheres in a way that leaves me wondering quite what the problem was in the first place. Passages seem to become almost transparent.

Bearing in mind that actually I have covered the first 5 books before, I'm conscious of the fact that the going is likely to get tougher as I hit genuinely virgin territory, but it's nice to feel I'm getting somewhere. Of course all this implies a hoary old message - you only get out of something what you're prepared to put into it. Oh, and if a thing's worth reading, it's worth reading slowly.