Looking at suicides in the Paris morgue--this would have been interesting to have come across when I was in my premature burial phase last summer. The speaker, at least as far as I'm concerned, seems to reflect a kind of obnoxiously narrow view of what might motivate someone to commit suicide, though I realize that may be part of the point of calling the poem "Apparent Failure"--it begins with an epigraph related to the tearing down of the building and the speaker's seemingly quixotic vow to save it.
The poem ends thus:
It's wiser being good than bad;
It's safer being meek than fierce:
It's fitter being sane than mad.
My own hope is, a sun will pierce
The thickest cloud earth ever stretched;
That, after Last, returns the First,
Though a wide compass round be fetched;
That what began best, can't end worst,
Nor what God bless once, prove accursed.
--and it's these kind of moments in Browning (orthodoxy flirting with tautology yet also possibly sincerity) that I find most disturbing.
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In other news, I joined a gym, worked out for two hours, and got a haircut. Let the 2009 model begin.
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