The poet's intention is not at all to give us a chapter in the origins of religion; nor is Caliban a representative of primitive man.

A frequently recurring idea with Browning is that expressed by Pope Innocent in the passage already cited; the external world proves the power of God; it proves His intelligence: but the proof of love is derived exclusively from the love that lives in the heart of man.

Are you dissatisfied with such a proof?
Well, then, see what a god we can construct out of intelligence and power, with love left out! If this world is not a place of trial and training appointed by love, then it is a scene of capricious cruelty or capricious indifference on the part of our Maker; His providence is a wanton sporting with our weakness and our misery.

Why were we brought into being?
To amuse His solitary and weary intelligence, and to become the victims or the indulged manifestations of His power.

Why is one man selected for extreme agony from which a score of his fellows escape?
Because god Setebos resembles Caliban, when through mere caprice he lets twenty crabs march past him unhurt and stones the twenty-first, Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.
If any of the phenomena of nature lead us to infer or imagine some law superior to the idle artistry and reckless will of Setebos, that law is surely very far away; it is "the Quiet" of Caliban's theology which takes no heed of human life and has for its outposts the cold unmoving stars.
Except the short piece named _May and Death_, which like Rossetti's poem of the wood-spurge, is founded upon one of those freaks of association that make some trival object the special remembrancer of sorrow, the remaining poems of _Dramatis Personae_, as originally published, are all poems of love.