Browning is really describing--with, perhaps, a half-scornful reference to his own desire for public appreciation--what he tried to do in _Sordello_ for the language in which his poetry was to be written.

I have said that when he came to write _Sordello_ his mind had fallen back from the clear theory of life laid down in _Paracelsus_ into a tumbled sea of troubled thoughts; and _Sordello_ is a welter of thoughts tossing up and down, now appearing, then disappearing, and then appearing again in conjunction with new matter, like objects in a sea above which a cyclone is blowing.

Or we may say that his mind, before and during the writing of _Sordello_, was like the thirteenth century, pressing blindly in vital disturbance towards an unknown goal.

That partly accounts for the confused recklessness of the language of the poem.

But a great many of the tricks Browning now played with his poetic language were deliberately done.