Browning has created him for us-- And no ignoble presence! On the bulge Of the clear baldness,--all his head one brow,-- True, the veins swelled, blue network, and there surged A red from cheek to temple,--then retired As if the dark-leaved chaplet damped a flame,-- Was never nursed by temperance or health.
But huge the eyeballs rolled back native fire, Imperiously triumphant: nostrils wide Waited their incense; while the pursed mouth's pout Aggressive, while the beak supreme above, While the head, face, nay, pillared throat thrown back, Beard whitening under like a vinous foam, There made a glory, of such insolence-- I thought,--such domineering deity Hephaistos might have carved to cut the brine For his gay brother's prow, imbrue that path Which, purpling, recognised the conqueror.
Impudent and majestic: drunk, perhaps, But that's religion; sense too plainly snuffed: Still, sensuality was grown a rite.
We see the man, the natural man, to the life.

But as the poem goes on, we company with his intellect and soul, with the struggle of sensualism against his knowledge of a more ideal life; above all, with one, who indulging the appetites and senses of the natural man, is yet, at a moment, their master.

The coarse chambers of his nature are laid bare, his sensuous pleasure in the lower forms of human life, his joy in satirising them, his contempt for the good or the ideal life if it throw the sensual man away.

Then, we are made to know the power he has to rise above this--without losing it--into the higher imaginative region where, for the time, he feels the genius of Sophocles, Euripides, the moral power of Balaustion, and the beauty of the natural world.

Indeed, in that last we find him in his extant plays.