For the moment all the springs of poetry were dried up, and it is credible enough that, as Mrs Orr says, Browning abandoned all thought of a poem, and even handed over his material to another.

But within a few months, it is clear, the story of Pompilia not merely recovered its hold upon his imagination, but gathered a subtle hallowing association with what was most spiritual in that vanished past of which it was the last and most brilliant gift.

The poem which enshrined Pompilia was thus instinct with reminiscence; it was, with all its abounding vitality, yet commemorative and memorial; and we understand how Browning, no friend of the conventions of poetic art, entered on and closed his giant task with an invocation to the "Lyric Love," as it were the Urania, or heavenly Muse, of a modern epic.
The definite planning of the poem in its present shape belongs to the autumn of 1862.

In September 1862 he wrote to Miss Blagden from Biarritz of "my new poem which is about to be, and of which the whole is pretty well in my head--the Roman murder-story, you know."[48] After the completion of the _Dramatis Personae_ in 1863-64, the "Roman murder-story" became his central occupation.

To it three quiet early morning hours were daily given, and it grew steadily under his hand.