His power of flashing a situation or a thought into a few words is well known.

But he did not always use this power.

And in _The Ring and the Book_, as in some of the poems that followed it, he seems now and then to despise that power.
And now for the poem itself.

Browning tells the story eight times by different persons, each from a different point of view, and twice more by the same person before and after his condemnation and, of course, from two points of view.

Then he practically tells it twice more in the prologue and the epilogue--twelve times in all--and in spite of what I have said about the too great length of the poem, this is an intellectual victory that no one else but Browning could have won against its difficulties.